ABSTRACT
The chapter explores the intertwining of the quests for anglicisation and Indianness in nineteenth-century Bengal which framed the simultaneous origin of Indian middle-class self-fashioning as English and Indian middle-class nationalism. Here I primarily focus on the writings of Rabindranath Tagore who briefly became one of the most prominent leaders of the Swadeshi movement, the first significant middle-class-led nationalist anticolonial mass movement in India. By exploring his social and political essays written in the decades leading up to the Swadeshi movement, I explore how Tagore became a proponent of a unique cultural argument which proposed that one could become a “true” Indian or a “true” Hindu only by becoming less and less like the modern-day Hindus/Indians and more and more like the colonisers. I then go on to show how this singularly paradoxical argument culminates in Tagore’s 1910 novel Gora where the protagonist comes to embody the authentic spirit of Indianness only through realising that at the corporeal level, he is part of the community of white European colonisers and therefore socially unacceptable to all castes and creeds inhabiting the subcontinent.
