Nationalism in India: Past and Present

The arch reactionary Metternich is reputed to have denounced the idea of Italy as a nation by asserting that Italy was merely a ‘geographical expression’. Through this gibe he still rendered a service by reminding his listeners that a geographically well-defined territory, or country, does not necessarily constitute a nation. In this context the word ‘nation’ means something substantially more than its earlier sense of simply a large group of people. In the seventeenth century, the English East India Company’s factors in India would speak of even the Banya caste as the ‘Banya nation’. It was the French Revolution of 1789 which, by raising the slogan of ‘independence of nations’, inserted a crucial addition to the sense of nation – the sense not simply of the people of a country, but within them also the wide existence of the aspiration to be and to remain independent, or, as John Stuart Mill later put it, ‘to be governed by persons from amongst themselves’.