ABSTRACT
Historians who focused on the politics of western-educatedelites had little hesitation in identifying the beginnings ofmodern nationalism, narrowly defined, as the most important historical theme of late-nineteenth-century India. The foundation of the Indian National Congress in 1885 provided a convenient starting point for those with a penchant for chronological precision. The recent reorientation of modern Indian historiography towards subordinate social groups has dramatically altered perspectives and added confusion, complexity, subtlety, and sophistication to the understanding of Indian society in the high noon of colonialism. Anticolonialism can be seen now to have been a much more variegated phenomenon than simply the articulate dissent of educated urban groups imbued with western concepts of liberalism and nationalism. The currents and cross-currents of social reform informed by ‘reason’, and its apparent rejection in movements of religious revival, are being weighed and analysed more carefully. The overlapping nature of the periodization of resistance is being recognized. The ulgulan or great tumult of 1899-1900 of the Munda tribe on the Bengal-Bihar border was, after all, roughly coterminous with the first major attempt by the educated urban elite to mobilize mass support for the swadeshi movement of 1905-8. What was novel, however, about the late nineteenth century was the interconnectedness, though not necessarily the convergence, of social and political developments across regions on an unprecedented scale. In that general sense it was during this period that the idioms, and even the irascible idiosyncrasies, of communitarian identities
and national ideologies were sought to be given a semblance of coherence and structure. What needs emphasizing is that there were multiple and competing narratives informed by religious and linguistic cultural identities seeking to contribute to the emerging discourse on the Indian nation.
