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Introduction

Beyond the Circle of Violence and Progress: Ethics and Material Development in India and Egypt, anti-colonial struggle to independence, 2023
This history chronicles the “scientific temper” in modern Indian political thought, linking the prolonged multi-cultural Indian freedom struggle to the post-independence Nehruvian experiment in democratic pluralism. It methodologically re-examines Amartya Sen, Ranajit Guha, Bipan Chandra and other major Indian thinkers in this light. The links between activists like al-Afghani, the 1857 rebellion, and Egypt’s Urabi Revolution, amidst India-Egypt uprisings, provide the transnational context. The “scientific temper” is traced through Ambedkar’s reconstructed Indian Buddhism and Tagore’s reconstructed Hindu-Muslim “composite culture”, both seminal imaginings of post-independence India, as well as its antithesis in such anti-Enlightenment discourses as Iqbal’s Heideggerian reconstruction of Indian Islam. The “scientific temper” enabled Nehruvian India to build a single national political track through universal franchise, a historically unprecedented power transfer, rooted in a Gandhian ahimsa, a reconstruction of the French revolutionary heritage centring non-violent civilian inclusion. The specificities of national movements, not merely the imperial legacy, explain post-independence trajectories. Nasserite Egypt and Nehruvian India experienced distinctive cumulative pathways: from Muhammad Ali’s military modernization and thwarted Urabi attempts at democratic socialist revolution, to Nasser’s championing of military dictatorship, longue durée combinations of political, military, economic and ideological power determine specific outcomes, in what Karl Polanyi defined as a “double movement”. By identifying the core elements of the Indian freedom struggle as an original landmark contribution to universal human emancipation, we simultaneously expose what is stake in contemporary India as the multi-cultural and democratic paradigm is threatened by reactionary alternatives....Read more