Vernacular Nationalism and Imagining the Political: The Development of Gujarati Identity at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

Abstract

Vernacular Nationalism and Imagining the Political: The Development of Gujarati Identity at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

This thesis uses the concept of vernacular nationalism to examine the development of regional identity in what we term the Indian subcontinent at the turn of the twentieth century. In that it happened in the vernacular languages, it is vernacular, but the identity it interpellated and claimed was beyond the community that spoke that particular language. Vernacular nationalism appeared across different language-communities at different points of time. Drawing on historical scholarship, I argue that vernacular nationalism is not only about the presence of nationalism within the vernacular but about the absence of the national. Different vernacular-nationalisms seemed to have a national signifier in common, but worked with different ideas of what that signifier meant.

As one example of such vernacular nationalism, I examine the development of Gujarati identity at the turn of the twentieth century. I look at two Gujarati authors, Govardhanram Tripathi (1855-1907) and Kanaiyalal Munshi (1887-1971), and examine the consolidated Gujarati identity that emerges through their best-known works. Vernacular writing from the colonial period is usually examined using the framework of 'alternative modernities'. I argue that colonial modernity was an impossible project, and therefore does not offer significant interpretive possibilities for the analysis of vernacular literature. Moreover, colonial modernity creates a specific version of the traditional, that does not challenge colonial modernity but works well in tandem with it. Given this, I choose not to use the traditional/modern framework to analyse the writings of these two authors; instead, I use close textual analysis to identify the themes arising from within these works and what they suggest about the formation of Gujarati identity.

The works that I examine are the four-volume Sarasvatichandra by Govardhanram Tripathi and Patan ni Prabhuta (1916), Gujarat no Nath (1917-1918) and Rajadhiraj (1922) by Kanaiyalal Munshi. I look at the ways in which these books articulate different understandings of the political through their representations of three ideals: the kingdom, the household and the ashram. I call these ideals rather than spaces because I examine them more as metaphors rather than in solely spatial terms. These two authors are often seen as foils to each other, creating different versions of Gujarati identity, with Tripathi as less insular than Munshi. I argue, however, that they create a remarkably similar Gujarati identity: pragmatic in administrative politics, locating gendered relationships firmly within the considerations of the caste-community and not just Hindu but Brahminical. Their world does not have space for the Muslim or the Dalit except as caricatures. Tripathi offers a potential decolonial articulation when he articulates his vision of politics as contextual and contingent, but that is undermined by his commitment to modernity as progress. The version of Gujarati identity that these two men created at the turn of the twentieth-century remains definitive, and by demonstrating how it came to be I hope to raise the question for the present-day reader: do we want to choose to carry on this specific version of Gujarati identity into the future? Show more