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| The
Hindu Phenomenon |
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HINDU
NATIONALISM : THE FIRST PHASE
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imperialist perversion in the name of knowledge made it out that
Hindu society had got frozen just above the primitive level. In
fact, studies of Africa served as the model for studies on India.
This by itself is a fascinating story which has been narrated by
Adam Kuper in The Invention of Primitive Society.10
The interesting point about it is that this invention was, to begin
with, the handiwork of lawyers and not of anthropologists, who moved
into the act much later. It inevitably influenced British civil
servants and other Britishers and Europeans who fed on it. It also
undermined the development of the Raj as a genuinely Indo-British
enterprise. More pertinently, it could not but distort the
perspective of the Indian intelligentsia which was to emerge as the
dominant force in the country as English became the language of
higher education, administration and justice. The distortion
produced alienation which, if anything, has grown since independence
for the obvious reason that the countervailing power of nationalism
and patriotism, which the fact of imperialist domination brought
into existence, has weakened. The doctrine of socialism, and of
secularism, not as an expression of Hindu catholicity but as an
offshoot and ally of socialism, has played a crucial role in this
aggravation of alienation, which we shall discuss at a later stage.
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| About
Hindu Nationalism: The First Phase |
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