The Idea of Freedom in Bengali Nationalist Discourse

Abstract

While the concept of freedom in India has mainly been seen through the lens of the freedom struggle/movement, this article conjoins the idea (concept) and practice (movement) of freedom as reflected in the Bengali nationalist discourse during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. It argues that freedom was a multidimensional concept and contained many connotative strands. Indigenous lineages were linked to the political idea of freedom, expressed as swaraj. But this political term was not seen in terms of politics alone. Rather, it was an evocation and extension of the older idea of freedom in India (as a category of the spiritual, emphasizing identity with the universal). This strand symbolized the indigeneity of freedom by highlighting aspects of personal and social freedom. To understand the nature of freedom as woven into the texture of the freedom movement in India—pioneered by the Indian National Congress, I explore how indigenous origins were refracted through a critical internalization and rearticulation of Western concepts of freedom in India’s own terms. This developed through a discourse on freedom on the site of samaj or social collectivity. It evolved within a grid, in which two principles— dharma and cultural Aryan-ness—set apart Indian society from the West and also underpinned the imagination of the nation. This emblematized the ‘independence’ of the subjugated through contestation of certain basic tenets of colonial power-knowledge. This shows that there was an interpenetration of different related freedoms, in the site of a harmonious social order ( samaj), and this crucially influenced ways of rethinking Indianness and nationhood.