Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012. xxiv, 342 pp. (Map, illus.) C$157.95, cloth. ISBN 978-0-674-04895-9.
The Righteous Republic is an ambitious book. Through an exploration of the category of swaraj(commonly translated as self-rule), it seeks to understand what constitutes the “self” for five “founders” of India. That four of the five founders are Mohandas Gandhi, Rabindranath Tagore, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Bhim Rao Ambedkar is not surprising. The fifth—artist Abanindranath Tagore—is a somewhat surprising inclusion. Vajpeyi argues that each of the founders experienced a “crisis in the self” (xiv) and that each of them turned to Indian or Indic traditions to overcome it. Vajpeyi’s aim is to tell the story of the “quest of the five founders for an Indian selfhood hitherto obscured by foreign domination” (10). She also refers to “Muslim traditions of inquiry into self and sovereignty in the making of India” (33), but admits that she does not have the wherewithal to understand the intellectual antecedents of thinkers like Sayyid Ahmed Khan, Mohammed Iqbal, Mohammad Ali Jinnah and Maulana Azad.
While swaraj is the “master category” of the book, Vajpeyi’s major innovation is to isolate one category to frame the thoughts of each of the five founders. So for Gandhi the relevant category is ahimsa (non-violence), for Rabindranath viraha (longing), for Abanindranath samvega (shock), for Nehru dharma (law/order) and for Ambedkar duhkha (suffering). She explicates each category by interrogating the relationship between the founders and key texts in their lives. While no one can doubt that ahimsa defined Gandhi’s thinking and action, the other categories do not have the same kind of resonance for the other founders. It then becomes a box in which Vajpeyi is forced to categorize each founder’s thinking. It also seems that the founders, except for Gandhi, themselves rarely used the categories employed by Vajpeyi.
This is particularly true for Ambedkar and the category of duhkha. Vajpeyi points out in the chapter on Ambedkar that he repudiated the “Four Noble Truths” of the Buddha, which included duhkha, duhkha samudaya, duhkha nirodha and nirvana. The centrepiece of the chapter is an interesting analysis of Ambedkar’s conversion to Buddhism along with nearly 400,000 of his followers in 1956, which remains a bit of a puzzle to this day. But the analysis—which among other things rightly says that Ambedkar “attempted to disassociate himself and his people from the humiliating roles assigned to them in the narratives so dear to the Hindus” (225)—does not convincingly establish the centrality of duhkha in Ambedkar’s thought.
The analysis of Tagore’s thought through his engagement with the fifth-century Sanskrit poet Kalidasa’s long poem, Meghaduta (The Cloud Messenger), is unusual. While it could plausibly be argued that Rabindranath develops the category of viraha in his Meghaduta corpus (five poems written over fifty years), whether viraha defines the entire body of his work could be contested. The same could be said for the centrality of samvega in Abanindranath’s paintings. But Vajpeyi is right when she says, “The Tagores sought more than India’s liberation from British rule. They sought self-knowledge in the harness of poetry, in the protocols of painting, in the strains of music, in the intimations of a tradition that for thousands of years had pursued nothing if not to know that, the very One that knows” (167).
Vajpeyi is on surer ground in her analysis of Gandhi, partly because Gandhi himself had much to say on ahimsa. Vajpeyi makes the Bhagavad Gita central to Gandhi’s conception of ahimsa. She argues that Gandhi understood the Gita very differently from his contemporaries, reading it as a “text of ahimsa.” She writes that for Gandhi, “the Gita was the best possible guide to self-knowledge, ethical action, psychic discipline, and transcendental freedom in any circumstance, every single day throughout one’s life, and not just a dramatization of moral crisis and its resolution within a political framework” (75–76).
In her chapter on Nehru, Vajpeyi captures the inherent tensions in Nehru’s thought through the binary of dharma and artha. She does this by examining Nehru’s The Discovery of India, his adoption of Buddhist symbols for the Indian state and, as India’s first prime minister, his Letters to Chief Ministers. She describes Nehru’s dilemma eloquently: “The Janus-faced modern state provides a key to the split between Nehru’s dharma-oriented and artha-oriented tendencies: on the one hand, a massively popular freedom writer—passionate, ardent, eloquent, and principled—and on the other, a beleaguered elected administrator—scientific, systematic, deliberative, and compromising” (172).
The Righteous Republic is an impressive intellectual history of modern India. Vajpeyi seeks to correct the neglect of Indian intellectual traditions in constructing the lives and ideologies of India’s founders. As Vajpeyi points out, the founders drew their understandings of selfhood from “Hindu and Buddhist texts, from Buddhist and Mughal artifacts, from traditions that were classical and vernacular, living and dying, ancient and recent” (xxiii). She successfully excavates some of these intellectual traditions though at the cost of positing what seems too rigid a dichotomy between Indian and Western traditions and the imposition of one category to frame the thought of each of her five founders of India.
Ronojoy Sen
National University of Singapore, Singapore