7 - Disavowing Indian Exceptionalism

Summary

This chapter addresses how Greater India featured in the Hindu nationalist imagination and B.K. Sarkar’s oeuvre. Disavowing Indian exceptionalism, Greater India became a tool to trace and project the Hindu nation as a historical actor making its mark on the world. Magna India was imagined as a colonial sphere where the vigorous, manly Hindu imposed his national will. The twin objectives of challenging the East-West civilizational dichotomy and ‘restoring the nation to the world’ rested on reclaiming a form of historical agency that had been forgotten or ignored in British accounts. By stressing equivalence with the West and emphasizing the secular and ‘national’ agency of ‘world historical figures’ such as Ashoka and the Buddha, Sarkar sought to puncture the ‘myth’ of Indian civilization as other-worldly and mystical, and argued that ancient India had been a great colonizing, civilizing and secular power on a par with ancient Greece and Rome. Writing India into world history on decidedly Eurocentric terms inspired presentist calls for Young India to compete with the West. Such visions of a ‘Modern Greater India’ were linked to debates about the fate of Indian diaspora communities.