ABSTRACT
Nineteenth-century India came to be characterised by several inconsistencies and paradoxes. It was a time when nationalism jostled with universalism and when the fear of cultural alienation existed alongside trans-cultural postures. Such polarities poignantly manifested in Bengal, the first province to come under colonialist control. Arguably, it is for this reason that Hindu Bengal, which produced the first Western-educated intelligentsia in Asia, was subjected to quite contrary pulls: it produced some of the greatest supporters of Western modernity as well as its sharpest critics. This chapter examines the complex interpenetration of cultural nostalgia, inspired as it was by a burgeoning nationalism as well as the strongly idealistic urge to go beyond these boundaries. The right to cultural self-determination thus appeared to hang in a delicate balance with the ubiquity of the human condition, cutting across cultures and civilisations. However, both these positions, as I shall argue, were deeply rooted in the debilitating world of colonial subjectivity and, in substance, universalism was but another face of nationalism. It sought not so much to dismantle cultural barriers or boundaries as to claim that all societies and cultures ought to be treated on an equal footing. In the context of colonial India, universalism was a trope aimed at restoring the dignity and selfhood of the political subaltern. In this chapter, I rest my arguments on a critical assessment of the popular paradigms of religious eclecticism and syncretism, especially given the fact that religion was very often the preferred medium of self-understanding and self-expression among the colonised. Indeed, in 19th-century Indian thought, there was little that was fully secular. Within this discursive framework, I examine the increasing interest that modern Hindus showed in religions other than Hinduism, particularly in Buddhism. Given the overarching theme of this book, I also include a brief but interesting survey of changing Indian perceptions of Japan over time. Once taken to represent an alternative path to successful modernisation, material development and a key element in Asian resurgence against the dominance of Europe, Japan increasingly came under criticism from some prominent Indian intellectuals for uncritically emulating some of the unsavoury features of the contemporary West, such as militarism, an aggressive nationalism and imperialist designs that impinged upon the sovereignty of her neighbours. Two prominent figures from Bengal that represent this important transition and whose writings I refer to in this chapter are the Hindu monk Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902) and the poet Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941).
