This book brings the Indian Ocean forefront to the study of Empire, anti-colonial nationalism and ideas about globalization. It views the Ocean as the site where the local, regional and national intermingled with ideas of the universal. Together they constituted a sub-culture of tremendous economic and intellectual potential that could challenge the western global Empire. Sugata Bose focuses on this sub-culture that was the underbelly of Empire and sees it as an important propellant of anti-colonial nationalism. He laments that South Asian historiography has failed to integrate this referent to its larger narrative of nationalism and the formation of the nation state. He regrets that it has remained outside the purview of ideas of globalization as well. Bose offers a scathing critique of territorial nationalism that has so far framed the researches of most brands of south Asian studies. And he hits out at the more recent postmodern forays into the history of the nation seen as a ‘fragment’ in what is viewed as an elite western derived nationalist discourse. Instead, Bose admirably connects the history of the Indian Ocean to that of landlocked India. He makes a strong case for seeing the real and imagined nation beyond the confines of territorially bound nation states.
According to him territorial nationalism was sustained by its simultaneous contestations with the culturally and religiously defined ideas of universalism that are best enacted in the interregional space of the Indian Ocean. He concludes that the interconnectedness of the land and the Ocean offers a window into the myriad articulations of universalism, globalization and modernity that date the pre-colonial era. They continue, albeit reformulated, in the global age of Empire and make us rethink the monopolistic claim of the West on these concepts.
This book comes as a refreshing breather to students of South Asian history who have had an overdose of colonial subjecthood narratives that have coloured both elite and subaltern narratives of nationalism and the nation state. It opens new ways of looking at the ingeniousness of subjects in the heyday of global Empire. Bose provides answers to questions that all of us have been hesitant to ask so far: How far did people carry the colonial subject burden? According to Bose as unitary sovereignty and princely autocracy substituted the pre-colonial idea of shared sovereignty, colonial India and its subjects increasingly defended Britain’s imperial frontiers: the Gulf sheikhdoms now had British officials that reported to India. In the East, Penang, Singapore and Malacca came under Calcutta’s jurisdiction. Indian soldiers fought the 1903 Gulf war for the Empire. And Delhi remained the command sector until 1918. At the same time Indians travelled across to West and South East Asia as merchants, capitalists, and labourers. They worked for the Empire. However, being subjects of the Empire did not clip their creative imagination in any way. Bose shows how they interconnected with Chinese and other Asian counterparts, forged links amongst themselves across region and religious lines, accommodated religious difference and multiple ideas of the national and universal, and welded into a critical resource base. This could be tapped to give that extra push to the anti-colonial cause from outside the territorial confines of India. It could also serve as an alternate model of a nation state. One that was sustained through recognition of cultural and religious difference, rather than demarcated sharply from it in the manner of its western counterpart.
The stories of the loyal soldiers of the British Indian army who weathered it out in the two World Wars are far too well known. Muslim soldiers fighting Turkey in the First World War, and the brave Gurkhas of the Second World War have been since immortalized in museums, autobiographies of British generals, military histories, films and fiction. But what is less known is what this loyalty meant to the fashioning of the nation that was being imagined at a feverish pace in these war years? This is a question which has rarely been asked for fear of upsetting the singular narrative of territorial nationalism that has dominated Indian history writing. Bose reinforces the works of Ayesha Jalal, C.A Bayly, Tim Harper and others who question the postmodern simplistic imaginings of the nation state narrowly confined within the binary of colonial power relations. Through fascinating new material and letters of Indian soldiers, many of them Muslims fighting in the Gulf, he shows how their sense of Muslim universalism combined with anti-colonial nationalism even as they fought for the Empire. Across the Ocean interregional arena these men rarely had just the British Empire and the territorial Indian nation as the two ends of their choice options. They thought through their identities and loyalties in more complex ways. Thus the Indian soldier Kazi Nazrul Islam in Iraq, who later became famous as the revolutionary poet of Bengal, penned a Bengali soldier’s farewell message to that country. This expressed grief for the common loss of independence of his own homeland and of Iraq. And yet there were other identities and choices too that had to be juggled. As the case of Shah Nawaz Khan, the British Indian soldier turned INA recruit, shows. Islamic universalism for him posed no problems in making a choice for Subhash Chandra Bose’s appeal to join the INA. But this was also not initially out of any patriotism but as response to the dejection he experienced being ordered to surrender to the Japanese in 1942. His political choice for INA came only later when he heard Subhash Chandra Bose deliver a speech. As he said, he made his considered choice for the INA then, because he saw for the first time ‘India through the eyes of an Indian’.
Bose shows how both Gandhi and Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose tapped this ‘diasporic public sphere’ that was ingeniously carved out by Indians as historical subjects in their own rights. He traces the career of Gandhi in South Africa and Bose in the period of the Second World War in south East Asia to show how their anti-colonial nationalism was derived from the multiple, real and imaginary, notions of nation that intermingled with the global and religiously defined universalistic strains in expatriates. This accommodation of cultural difference rather than western derived ‘secular’ notion of nation state was exported to India. It proved critical in the formation of the idea of nation that was specific to the Indian context and not emulative of the West.
That the nation in the making was so multifaceted was evident in the travelogues of Muslim pilgrims to Mecca. As also in the travel literature of Tagore that described his visits to Muslim lands. Bose uses fascinating travel diaries of pilgrims to tell us the story of how during the international Haj pilgrimage the Muslim mind balanced the spiritual universal with its predicaments of being subjects in colonial India. Mecca became the site where the divine sovereignty offered the universal frame in which issues of temporal sovereignty like being subjects of Britain, the political fissures within the umma (community) and other conflicting identities were played out. Similarly, Tagore’s sojourns to Baghdad and Iran, and his visits to the grave sites of Iranian poets, Saadi and Hafiz in Shiraz, reminded him of his own universalism even as he appreciated and dwelt in their worldview crafted in dance, poetry, and music. Bose sees this bonding and nostalgia for the past as an effort to contribute to the global futur. An alternate worldview and universalism to that offered by the western nation state model.
This is a sophisticated, lucid and fine history of the Indian Ocean region, which revolutionizes our landlocked thinking of anti-colonial nationalism, nation state, globalization and modernity. Historians and political scientists have questioned these concepts as being western derived. But their import to India through the experiences of Indian diasporic communities is less known. The value of the admirable scholarship on display here is that it adds a brand new perspective from the Ocean that comes as a welcome whiff of fresh air to those tired of landlocked narrow readings of India’s colonial experience. However, one may hesitate to share entirely Bose’s optimism about the adoption of the alternate nation state model of cultural and religious accommodation based on blood rather than rights that were experimented in the diaspora public sphere. It is not very clear what he implies here. But if the allusion is to the failure of the post-colonial ‘secular’ nation state, and its slippage into divisive religious majorityism, then one is not too sure if this is because it is entirely modelled on the western ‘secular’ model. Perhaps it is the combined legacy of the diasporic model and the British colonial one that frames our governance. That is a lead that this fascinating account of the early 20th century offers to the political scientists to chew on!
Seema Alavi is Zakir Husain Professor of History at Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi.