ABSTRACT
Pinch explores a concept closely related to the self in modern and early modern India: the notion of sovereignty, or rājya. He does this via recourse to Bankim’s Anandamath (1882), Kipling’s Kim (1901), and Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj (1909), which he then places alongside and in conversation with a little-known eighteenth-century Hindi work of historical poetry, Anūpprakāś (ca. 1795) by Mān Kavi. Whereas Gandhi and Bankim’s works were formative expressions of Indian nationalist thought and Kipling’s of British imperialism, Mān Kavi’s late eighteenth-century poem is emblematic of the pre-nationalist and pre-colonial ‘courtly’ literature associated with the Rajput kingdoms of north India. Though a century of dramatic cultural and political change intervened between Mān Kavi and our later authors, it is nonetheless possible to discern some shared themes, especially with respect to power, the self, political legitimacy, and asceticism.
