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The Idea of India beyond Nationalist Thought
Registration Required for Zoom
A century after Ernst Renan called the nation a spiritual principle defying all social and natural categories, Benedict Anderson redefined it as a secular, albeit special, idea constructed through capitalist technologies. Postcolonial scholars have since challenged Anderson’s framing for undermining the agential autonomy of anticolonial nationalism. The preoccupation of this critical scholarship has primarily been sociological, focussing on how India was imagined as a nation. Taking a step back, my paper enquires historically into why India was imagined as an idea in the first place. Initially articulated as a rejoinder to the imperial representation of India as an incoherent collection of disaggregated ‘facts’, this idealist appeal emanated from the revolutionary camp helmed by Aurobindo Ghose and Bipin Chandra Pal, discontented by years of liberal debates over factual matters of political economy. The Indian idea was subsequently taken beyond the fold of nationalist thought by its principal proponent, the poet-philosopher Rabindranath Tagore, and reimagined as a concept that surpassed any fixed notion of ‘identity’. I reconstruct the intellectual history of the idea of India as it evolved in the late colonial period as a search for the structuring basis of its underlying political unity.
Against the physical and commercial might of the colonisers, the very immateriality of the idea was upheld by the revolutionaries for its sacred quality to mobilise a power not militaristic but sacrificial. Tagore critiqued this conception and located the Indian idea in the practice of welfarism, which had historically held together the disparate units of society, bound by shared ethics of work and responsibility. Departing from the particularism of his civilisational construction, he later predicated freedom and solidarity on a universally shared human capacity for creative action. This paper reconstructs the conceptual tussle between related yet rival ideas of sacrifice, welfare, and creation that founded India in anticolonial political thought.
Salmoli Choudhuri is an intellectual historian of legal and political concepts that have played a foundational role in shaping modern and contemporary India and informing global thought. After completing her PhD at the University of Cambridge in 2023, she joined the National Law School Bengaluru as an Assistant Professor. She is currently at Oxford as a Koch History Fellow. In addition to developing her doctoral thesis on Tagore and freedom into a monograph, she has begun a new project on juristic ideas of state-thinking in anticolonial political thought. Her work has appeared in journals such as Political Theology, Global Intellectual History, and Economic and Political Weekly.
Date:
24 November 2025, 16:00
Venue:
St Antony's College, 62 Woodstock Road OX2 6JF
Venue Details:
Pavilion Room & Zoom
Speaker:
Salmoli Choudhuri (Oxford and National Law School of India)
Organising department:
Asian Studies Centre
Organisers:
Abraham Murad (University of Oxford),
Jack Jacobs (Oriel College)
Organiser contact email address:
asian@sant.ox.ac.uk
Part of:
South Asian Intellectual History Seminars
Booking required?:
Required
Booking url:
https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_baVtwconQqi_RqOqcayVIA
Booking email:
asian@sant.ox.ac.uk
Audience:
Public
Editor:
Clare Salter
