Righteous Republic: The Political Foundations of Modern India - Hardcover

Vajpeyi, Ananya

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0674048954 ISBN 13: 9780674048959

Publisher: Harvard University Press, 2012

Synopsis

What India's founders derived from Western political traditions as they struggled to free their country from colonial rule is widely understood. Less well-known is how India's own rich knowledge traditions of two and a half thousand years influenced these men as they set about constructing a nation in the wake of the Raj. In Righteous Republic, Ananya Vajpeyi furnishes this missing account, a ground-breaking assessment of modern Indian political thought.

Taking five of the most important founding figures-Mohandas Gandhi, Rabindranath Tagore, Abanindranath Tagore, Jawaharlal Nehru, and B. R. Ambedkar-Vajpeyi looks at how each of them turned to classical texts in order to fashion an original sense of Indian selfhood. The diverse sources in which these leaders and thinkers immersed themselves included Buddhist literature, the Bhagavad Gita, Sanskrit poetry, the edicts of Emperor Ashoka, and the artistic and architectural achievements of the Mughal Empire. India's founders went to these sources not to recuperate old philosophical frameworks but to invent new ones. In Righteous Republic, a portrait emerges of a group of innovative, synthetic, and cosmopolitan thinkers who succeeded in braiding together two Indian knowledge traditions, the one political and concerned with social questions, the other religious and oriented toward transcendence.

Within their vast intellectual, aesthetic, and moral inheritance, the founders searched for different aspects of the self that would allow India to come into its own as a modern nation-state. The new republic they envisaged would embody both India's struggle for sovereignty and its quest for the self.

About this title

About the Author:

Ananya Vajpeyi is Fellow and Associate Professor at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, New Delhi.

Review:

“A thoroughly original, high-quality, and pathbreaking contribution to Indian intellectual history.”―Pratap Bhanu Mehta, Centre for Policy Research

“'Swaraj,' the key term in Indian nationalism, refers to the self. But what is this self that is the subject of Indian self-rule? Ananya Vajpeyi retraces the field of modern Indian political thought to analyze the answers offered by five canonical figures. Her work is original, acute, sensitive, frequently unconventional, and always delightfully readable.”―Partha Chatterjee, Columbia University

“In a series of sophisticated and original readings, Ananya Vajpeyi paints an arresting picture of the moral imaginary inside the tradition of modern Indian political thought. Against the grain of much recent interpretation, Vajpeyi argues that modern Indian political thought should be read not through Western categories like freedom, equality, and independence, but through subtle, underlying Indian categories―swaraj, viraha, samvega, dharma, artha, and duhkha. Righteous Republic offers an original and subtle re-reading of a familiar field, and persuades us to view it in a different light.”―Sudipta Kaviraj, Columbia University

“Ananya Vajpeyi's Righteous Republic: The Political Foundations of Modern India radically advances our understanding of political traditions in a major non-western country.”―Pankaj Mishra, The Guardian

“[Vajpeyi] reads the search for the self through five founders of modern India: Gandhi, Nehru, Ambedkar, and the Tagores, Rabindranath and his nephew Abanindranath...This is a book that must be read, not just for its arguments, which are innovative, and not just for its language, which is evocative, but for its singular achievement in making the familiar unfamiliar, and for demanding the asking of new questions.”―Manu Bhagavan, IBN Live

“What emerges from Righteous Republic is a sense of the intellectual ferment in India from the turn of the 20th century up to Independence; the sense of men, not just the five in the book, thinking up and imagining a country, rather than just being handed one by the British. The book is as much literary and art criticism as it is history, requiring of Vajpeyi some agile reading. She makes connections her five principals themselves may not have made, particularly in her excellent chapter of Abanindranath Tagore, making us consider afresh men and ideas to which we seem to have become inured.”―Shougat Dasgupta, Tehelka

“Swaraj: a word pervasive in the Indian philological lexicon, originating from the Sanskrit swa, meaning 'of the self,' and rajya--rule. The matter of deciding its true meaning from the combination of its two root verbs should be simple and yet, as Ananya Vajpeyi reveals in her first book on modern India's political foundations, it all depends on different perceptions of national duty. Vajpeyi's unique spin on the topic has her examining the classical sources of inspiration behind the teachings of five of India's most significant founding figures: Mohandas Gandhi, Rabindranath Tagore, his nephew Abanindranath Tagore, Jawaharlal Nehru, and BR Ambedkar. The 'righteous republic' based on self-rule, under Vajpeyi's close study, divulges its interwoven web mixing Sanskrit poetry, Buddhist teachings, the legacies of the Emperor Ashoka and Mughal dynasties of the past, and even the Bhagavad Gita, each having played a key role in shaping the political visions of these icons. Despite confessing to the self-perceived inadequacy of her completed work in her conclusion, there is scarcely a fault regarding the author's zest for the subject, a plus point that proves effective in rousing this reader's own interest.”―Noori Passela, The National

“Vajpeyi's quest for the sources of India's freedom struggle parts ways with traditional historiography on the subject in ways that renders her work unique and groundbreaking...For Vajpeyi, India's quest for freedom was as much a moral struggle for selfhood as for political freedom...Righteous Republic is a riveting story of five men's journeys of India's rich past through their 'readings' of texts and artifacts to discover those categories that would flesh out for them the laden ambiguities of 'swaraj.' Vajpeyi pulls the reader into uncharted territory, as these five men search and then find what they were looking for not in the dominant western discursive categories that they had been exposed to, but in a pre-modern lexicon...Outstanding scholarship, imbued with modest passion and effortless originality.”―Ashoak Upadhyay, Business Line

“[Vajpeyi] weaves the strands of self and sovereignty together to argue that Indian nationalism was a moral project to create a righteous republic distinguished by its 'solid plinth of moral selfhood and ethical sovereignty,' without which India would be just another state.”―Kranti Saran, Business Standard

“This is a book that is original, insightful and quirky.”―Swapan Dasgupta, Outlook

About this edition

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 0674048954
• ISBN 13: 9780674048959
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 368