CSAS_A_1078948.3d (CSAS) (174£248mm) 17-08-2015 6:57 PROOF COVER SHEET Author(s): Benjamin Zachariah Article title: Article no: Enclosures: At the Fuzzy Edges of Fascism: Framing the Volk in India 1078948 1) Query sheet 2) Article proofs Dear Author, 1. Please check these proofs carefully. It is the responsibility of the corresponding author to check these and approve or amend them. A second proof is not normally provided. Taylor & Francis cannot be held responsible for uncorrected errors, even if introduced during the production process. Once your corrections have been added to the article, it will be considered ready for publication. Please limit changes at this stage to the correction of errors. You should not make trivial changes, improve prose style, add new material, or delete existing material at this stage. You may be charged if your corrections are excessive (we would not expect corrections to exceed 30 changes). For detailed guidance on how to check your proofs, please paste this address into a new browser window: http://journalauthors.tandf.co.uk/production/checkingproofs.asp Your PDF proof file has been enabled so that you can comment on the proof directly using Adobe Acrobat. If you wish to do this, please save the file to your hard disk first. For further information on marking corrections using Acrobat, please paste this address into a new browser window: http:// journalauthors.tandf.co.uk/production/acrobat.asp 2. Please review the table of contributors below and confirm that the first and last names are structured correctly and that the authors are listed in the correct order of contribution. This check is to ensure that your name will appear correctly online and when the article is indexed. Sequence 1 Prefix Given name(s) Benjamin Surname Zachariah Suffix CSAS_A_1078948.3d (CSAS) (174£248mm) 17-08-2015 6:57 Queries are marked in the margins of the proofs, and you can also click the hyperlinks below. Content changes made during copy-editing are shown as tracked changes. Inserted text is in red font and revisions have a blue indicator . Changes can also be viewed using the list comments function. To Finsert or delete text following the instructions below, but do not add correct the proofs, you should n comments to the existing tracked changes. AUTHOR QUERIES General points: 1. Permissions: You have warranted that you have secured the necessary written permission from the appropriate copyright owner for the reproduction of any text, illustration, or other material in your article. Please see http://journalauthors.tandf.co.uk/permissions/ usingThirdPartyMaterial.asp. 2. Third-party content: If there is third-party content in your article, please check that the rightsholder details for re-use are shown correctly. 3. Affiliation: The corresponding author is responsible for ensuring that address and email details are correct for all the co-authors. Affiliations given in the article should be the affiliation at the time the research was conducted. Please see http://journalauthors.tandf.co.uk/ preparation/writing.asp. 4. Funding: Was your research for this article funded by a funding agency? If so, please insert ‘This work was supported by <insert the name of the funding agency in full>’, followed by the grant number in square brackets ‘[grant number xxxx]’. 5. Supplemental data and underlying research materials: Do you wish to include the location of the underlying research materials (e.g. data, samples or models) for your article? If so, please insert this sentence before the reference section: ‘The underlying research materials for this article can be accessed at <full link>/ description of location [author to complete]’. If your article includes supplemental data, the link will also be provided in this paragraph. See <http://journalauthors.tandf. co.uk/preparation/multimedia.asp> for further explanation of supplemental data and underlying research materials. 6. The CrossRef database (www.crossref.org/) has been used to validate the references. Resulting changes are tracked in red font. Q1. Q2. Q3. Q4. Q5. Q6. Q7. Q8. Q9. Q10. Note 5: Pls provide the name/s of the editor/s or writer of this book. Note 10 [Zachariah]: Pls provide the issue number, if available. Note 48 [Rosselli]: Pls provide the relevant volume number, if available. Note 53: Pls provide the relevant issue number, if available. Note 64: Pls provide the relevant volume number, issue number and page numbers, if available. Note 67: Pls provide the name of the publishing house. Note 72: Pls provide the name of the publishing house. Note 74 [Sarkar]: Pls provide the name of the publishing house. Note 74 [Hoffmann]: Pls provide the name of the publishing house. Note 74 [Glasenapp]: Pls provide the name of the publishing house. CSAS_A_1078948.3d (CSAS) (174£248mm) 17-08-2015 6:57 How to make corrections to your proofs using Adobe Acrobat/Reader Taylor & Francis offers you a choice of options to help you make corrections to your proofs. Your PDF proof file has been enabled so that you can edit the proof directly using Adobe Acrobat/Reader. This is the simplest and best way for you to ensure that your corrections will be incorporated. If you wish to do this, please follow these instructions: 1. Save the file to your hard disk. 2. Check which version of Adobe Acrobat/Reader you have on your computer. You can do this by clicking on the “Help” tab, and then “About”. If Adobe Reader is not installed, you can get the latest version free from http://get.adobe.com/ reader/. 3. If you have Adobe Acrobat/Reader 10 or a later version, click on the “Comment” link at the right-hand side to view the Comments pane. 4. You can then select any text and mark it up for deletion or replacement, or insert new text as needed. Please note that these will clearly be displayed in the Comments pane and secondary annotation is not needed to draw attention to your corrections. If you need to include new sections of text, it is also possible to add a comment to the proofs. To do this, use the Sticky Note tool in the task bar. Please also see our FAQs here: http://journalauthors.tandf.co.uk/ production/index.asp. 5. Make sure that you save the file when you close the document before uploading it to CATS using the “Upload File” button on the online correction form. If you have more than one file, please zip them together and then upload the zip file. If you prefer, you can make your corrections using the CATS online correction form. Troubleshooting Acrobat help: http://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat.html Reader help: http://helpx.adobe.com/reader.html Please note that full user guides for earlier versions of these programs are available from the Adobe Help pages by clicking on the link “Previous versions” under the “Help and tutorials” heading from the relevant link above. Commenting functionality is available from Adobe Reader 8.0 onwards and from Adobe Acrobat 7.0 onwards. Firefox users: Firefox’s inbuilt PDF Viewer is set to the default; please see the following for instructions on how to use this and download the PDF to your hard drive: http://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/view-pdf-files-firefox-without-downloadingthem#w_using-a-pdf-reader-plugin CSAS_A_1078948.3d (CSAS) (174£248mm) 17-08-2015 6:57 South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 2015 Vol. 0, No. 0, 1 17, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2015.1078948 At the Fuzzy Edges of Fascism: Framing the Volk in India BENJAMIN ZACHARIAH, Karl Jaspers Centre for Advanced Transcultural Studies, Heidelberg University, Heidelberg, Germany 5 10 The genealogies of v€ olkisch ideas everywhere would suggest that they were relatively widespread in a world thinking about defining the nature of nationalism. The idea of the Volk has its origins, of course, in German romanticist imaginings of the German nation. The glorification of an ‘Aryan’ past in India, the identification of the ‘folk element’, or a connection with sacred soil and sacred space, shared the same building blocks of romantic nationalism that were evident across the world. This essay focuses on Indian v€ olkisch nationalism through the work and career of Benoy Kumar Sarkar, his engagements with German and Indian ideas, his ability to translate them across their specific contexts and his institutional linkages. Keywords: Volk; fascism; Nazism; Benoy Kumar Sarkar; Greater India Society; Ramakrishna Mission; theosophy; Deutsche Akademie; Aryan; Hindu 15 20 25 30 Introduction Given the prevalence of Right-wing movements that look very like fascist movements in India (which includes the parts of the former British India and the former Princely States that are no longer parts of India) from the early twentieth century to the present day, it seems important, even obvious, to bring India into the analysis of v€ olkisch and fascist ideas and movements. Yet, if fascism as an academic field of study can (or thinks it can) do without India, it is more than apparent that by now, both politically and academically, India cannot do without fascism. And if fascism cannot do without the v€ olkisch, this is true in both India and elsewhere in the world. What is required, in the absence of a proper debate on fascism, the Volk and the question of the authentic national voice in the historiography of South Asia, is to listen in on a mostly Eurocentric debate and to restore South Asia’s rightful place in the history of Rightwing movements. Given too that the age of the rise of fascism was also an age of internationalism, which was the context for a movement or set of movements that disavowed its or their own internationalist parochialism(s), it is only logical to reiterate here that there was not a separate ‘European’ and ‘South Asian’ political sphere of debates: they were inexorably connected.1 The point of this essay is not to set up a teleology of fascism in general or for South Asia. Indeed, the genealogies of v€ olkisch ideas everywhere would suggest that some v€ olkisch ideas Thanks are due to two anonymous referees who engaged closely with this piece, and to several persons who have discussed fascism and fascists with me over the years, some of whom would not like to be implicated in my conclusions, but you know who you are, and I have thanked you before. 1 See Ali Raza, Franziska Roy and Benjamin Zachariah, ‘Introduction: The Internationalism of the Moment— South Asia and the Contours of the Interwar World’, in Ali Raza, Franziska Roy and Benjamin Zachariah (eds), The Internationalist Moment: South Asia, Worlds and World Views, 1917 1939 (New Delhi: Sage, 2015), pp. xi xli. Ó 2015 South Asian Studies Association of Australia CSAS_A_1078948.3d (CSAS) 2 (174£248mm) 17-08-2015 6:57 South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies led nowhere, or at least not to fascism, but they were relatively widespread in a world thinking about defining the nature of nationalism (and we now agree at least that fascism is a form of nationalism).2 The idea of the Volk has its origins, of course, in romanticist imaginings of the German nation in an era of European nationalisms. It was anti-rationalist, ethnic, racialised, anti-Semitic and organicist and it glorified all things it could claim as ‘Germanic’; the extent of its commitment to paganism, or to religion at all, remains open to debate and depends on variations and emphases among its followers.3 This glorification of an ‘Aryan’ past in India, or a connection with sacred soil and sacred space, hardly needed a (later) Nazi affiliation, but it had been a part of the same building blocks of romantic nationalism across the world. A Savarkarian Hindutva or a Sarkarian Volk would unproblematically have shared certain distinctions with one another, as with the protagonists of a Germanic Volk.4 As for the authentic Hindu or Aryan, past, present and future, groups like the Arya Samaj, social reformers and anti-Muslim campaigners, the Ramakrishna Mission, or the Theosophists and their splinter groups, competed with one another for the right to define this, but did not substantially disagree that there was one.5 The advantage and problem of tracing a movement in retrospect, with the benefit of hindsight, is that we can see developments that actors of the time could not see. This warning notwithstanding, we need to read the histories of these times backwards as well as forwards, both as genealogy (with branches of a family tree dying out—analogies prove nothing, as Sigmund Freud once wrote, but they make us feel more at home)6 and as teleology, even if a cautious teleology. As the European debates indicate, the ideas that made for fascism were already around at the end of the nineteenth century; they came together in the conjunctural situation provided by the end of World War I, but this coming together was not predictable or ee perspectives inevitable.7 In addition, there needs to be a place for conjunctural or longue dur that are not entirely actor-centric even in work that takes actor-centric categories seriously— for, otherwise, we confuse terms for movements and movements for terms, and the term ‘fascist’ as a descriptive as well as normative category loses its specificity or its usefulness. There are difficulties in these attempts to bridge debates. The connections between fascist ideas and particular Indian nationalist thinkers is an important theme that appears to fall 35 40 45 50 55 60 2 Q1 Stefan Arvidsson, Aryan Idols: Indo-European Mythology as Ideology and Science (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 2006). 3 Uwe Puschner, Die V€ olkische Bewegung im wilhelminischen Deutschland. Sprache—Rasse—Religion (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2001); and Stefan Breuer, Die V€ olkischen in Deutschland. Kaiserreich und Weimarer Republik (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2008). 4 See Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, Hindutva: Who Is a Hindu? (Nagpur: Bharat Publications, 1928), by way of comparison. For an analysis of the genesis of concepts of Hindutva, see Jyotirmaya Sharma, Hindutva: Exploring the Idea of Hindu Nationalism (New Delhi: Viking, 2003), in which he treats the ideas of Swami Dayanand Saraswati of the Arya Samaj, Aurobindo Ghosh, the revolutionary-turned-mystic, Swami Vivekananda, the godman and founder of the Hindu missionary order, the Ramakrishna Mission, and Vinayak Damodar Savarkar of the Hindu Mahasabha. Sharma does not relate his argument to the idea of the Volk, but he might easily have done so. 5 The intermingling of ideas of race, nation and Aryan Hindu in India has been noted before. For a summary of the debate, see Benjamin Zachariah, ‘The Invention of Hinduism for National Use’, Playing the Nation Game (Delhi: Yoda Press, 2011), pp. 153 204. 6 Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (London: Hogarth Press, [1917] 1963). This was a throwaway remark that I cannot trace the page numbers of manually, as I still have a paper copy. 7 Zeev Sternhell, ‘How to Think about Fascism and Its Ideology’, in Constellations, Vol. 15, no. 3 (2008), pp. 280 90; David D. Roberts, ‘How Not to Think about Fascism and Ideology, Intellectual Antecedents and Historical Meaning’, in Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 35, no. 2 (2000), pp. 185 211; and Kevin Passmore, ‘The Ideological Origins of Fascism before 1914’, in R.J.B. Bosworth (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Fascism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 11 31. CSAS_A_1078948.3d (CSAS) (174£248mm) 17-08-2015 6:57 At the Fuzzy Edges of Fascism 65 70 75 80 85 90 95 3 between two more established academic disciplines: of the European study of fascism done predominantly by those who see themselves as ‘Western’ scholars (with some work now being done on eastern Europe) and of the study of major strands of (in particular) Indian nationalism. This scholarship on fascism tends to ignore the extra-European writing for reasons of embarrassment, disciplinary specialisation or (in)competence or because it is seen as a secondary part of the history of fascist ideas. Many scholars of South Asian history, or of intellectual history more generally, might also say that this is a question of European ‘influence’ on Indian thinking in a flat impact response sense.8 A good starting point, therefore, is from a central question of nationalism anywhere, and also therefore of South Asian nationalisms—the question of finding the ‘authentic’ voice of the ‘nation’, a voice which had to be ‘indigenous’, not ‘foreign’. This essay, therefore, studies the borderlands of an Indian engagement with fascism: the idea of the authenticity of the ‘folk’, connecting to organicist ideas of community and nation in the twentieth century whose protagonists recognised affinities with fascism and, later, Nazism. The essay hinges on the use of ideas of the ‘indigenous’ or the ‘authentic’. It problematises the assumed linearity of ideas about a Hindu/Indian race or nation and also questions the directionality of narratives of the travel and absorption of fascist ideas: not from Europe to elsewhere, but multilinear and multilaterally invented. To study this, it is important to place India in the wider context of the world at the time of which we are speaking. The emergence of a fascist imaginary and a fascist set of political organisations in the 1920s and 1930s depended to a large extent on a voluntary co-ordination of ideas, movements and institutions that saw themselves as belonging to the same family, but adopted the characteristics of a more successful sibling. A number of these ideas, in which race and Volk were operative categories, had existed in earlier versions from the previous century. The longer history of engaging with ideas of race and Volk in India and the world was part of the same history, rather than a separate one, dating from the mid to late nineteenth century. And the coalescing of ideological frameworks that were recognisably fascist or Nazi took place in a context whereby the lesser strains in a worldwide framework of thinking clustered around the more successful strains, borrowing and adapting from them and thereby ‘working towards the Nazis’—as they had worked towards the Italian Fascists before them.9 But this adaptation did not altogether abandon its right to manoeuvre, to select from a fascist repertoire—and, later, to remould it to create new languages of legitimation. Indeed, nationalism is particularly sensitive to the charge of being merely imitative: if the ‘authentic genius’ of every people must find expression in the ‘nation’, obviously an imitative nation is a contradiction in terms. This essay does not discuss theories and theorisations of fascism and Nazism in any detail, nor will it discuss a significant number of direct collaborative ventures between Nazi leaning 8 For a critique of which, see Paul Cohen, Discovering History in China (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). On Indian ‘Auseinandersetzungen’ (with Italian Fascism and German Nazism), see Maria Framke, DelhiRom-Berlin: die indische Wahrnehmung von Faschismus und Nationalsozialismus 1922 1939 (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2013), esp. p. 14. 9 ‘Working towards the Nazis’ is a reference to Ian Kershaw’s idea of ‘working towards the F€uhrer’, in which he says that ordinary Germans, ordinary bureaucrats and other Nazis anticipated what they thought were the F€ uhrer’s wishes and sought to carry them out, which is what made an ordinarily weak dictatorship function. See Ian Kershaw, ‘“Working Towards the F€uhrer”: Reflections on the Nature of the Hitler Dictatorship’, in Contemporary European History, Vol. 2, no. 2 (July 1993), pp. 103 18. For a broader analysis on Indian engagements with fascism, see Benjamin Zachariah, ‘Rethinking (the Absence of) Fascism in India, c. 1922 1945’, in Sugata Bose and Kris Manjapra (eds), Cosmopolitan Thought Zones: South Asia and the Global Circulation of Ideas (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 178 209. CSAS_A_1078948.3d (CSAS) 4 (174£248mm) 17-08-2015 6:57 South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies and explicitly Nazi institutions and Indian co-workers or interlocutors (this has been done elsewhere).10 It concentrates, instead, on providing close readings of a limited number of texts and contexts to show some of the contours of the basis for Indo-fascist and Indo-Nazi ideological affinities and exchanges, and on the idea of the Volk. The essay also concentrates a good deal on ideas or ideological tendencies and frameworks to the neglect of actual movements of (proto-)fascist paramilitary organisations and their political parent bodies, as also the question of fascist aesthetics.11 Fascist movements are not original, not ideologically consistent, are clearer about who or what they are against than what they are for, and are willing to improvise or to borrow popular (and populist) elements from other movements.12 At the same time, in order for resonances to be resonant, there must be a history of broadly compatible ideas that become the basis of borrowings. An analysis at the level of movements, the mobilisation of the alleged organic nation in the form of paramilitary organisations, must also be carried out without sidestepping the question of fascism. There is a populism at the empty core of fascisms, where the purificatory power of violence, and the identification of the enemy within, operates at an important level beyond ideology.13 It is possible to use a ‘style’ argument and suggest that aspirations to military or paramilitary mobilisation dating back to before World War I were universal in the India of the 1920s and 1930s, but also partaking of a worldwide tendency, in other words as a ‘fascist repertoire’ rather than as a ‘fascist minimum’.14 The ‘fascist minimum’ argument relies on an agreed upon set of attributes without which a political movement is not yet, or not quite, fascism, whereas a ‘fascist repertoire’ argument is less concerned with a check-list of elements, all of which have to be present in order for the movement to meet the minimum qualification as properly fascist. Instead, it enables us to see a wider repertoire from which ideologues have the agency to choose. The repertoire tends to include an organicist and primordialist nationalism, a controlling statism that disciplines the members of the organic nation to act as, for and in that organic or v€ olkisch nation, which must therefore be duly purified and preserved, in the service of which a paramilitarist tendency towards national discipline is invoked, and the coherence of the repertoire is maintained by invoking a sense of 100 105 110 115 120 125 10 Q2 This is argued in more detail in Benjamin Zachariah, ‘A Voluntary Gleichschaltung? Perspectives from India towards a Non-Eurocentric Understanding of Fascism’, in Transcultural Studies, Vol. 2 (Dec. 2014), pp. 8 44. The literature on how Italian Fascism started to resemble German Nazism after the Axis began to form (in particular with regard to anti-Semitism) has been useful in this regard. See, for instance, M.A. Ledeen, ‘The Evolution of Italian Fascist Antisemitism’, in Jewish Social Studies, Vol. 37, no. 1 (Winter 1975), pp. 3 17. I use the term ‘fascist repertoire’ in the manner of Federico Finchelstein’s use of the phrase ‘fascist catalogue of ideas’. See Federico Finchelstein, Transatlantic Fascism: Ideology, Violence, and the Sacred in Argentina and Italy, 1919 1945 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), p. 6. See Benjamin Zachariah, Review of Transatlantic Fascism in Social History, Vol. 36, no. 2 (May 2011), pp. 215 6, for an account of why this is useful. 11 See the other essays in this collection. 12 Juan J. Linz, ‘Some Notes towards a Comparative Study of Fascism in Sociological Historical Perspective’, in Walter Laqueur (ed.), Fascism: A Reader’s Guide (Harmondsworth: Pelican, [1976] 1979), pp. 13 78, esp. pp. 29 31. 13 ‘They subordinate thought and reason not to faith, as did the traditional Right, but to the promptings of the blood and the historic destiny of the group. Their only moral yardstick is the prowess of the race, of the nation, of the community. They claim legitimacy by no universal standard except a Darwinian triumph of the strongest community’. Robert O. Paxton, ‘The Five Stages of Fascism’, in Journal of Modern History, Vol. 70, no. 1 (Mar. 1998), pp. 1 23, quote pp. 4 5. 14 Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), p. 58; Zachariah, ‘Rethinking (the Absence of) Fascism in India, c. 1922 1945’, p. 184; Franziska Roy, ‘Youth, Paramilitary Organisations and National Discipline in South Asia, c. 1915 1950’, unpublished PhD thesis, Warwick University, 2013; and Zachariah, ‘A Voluntary Gleichschaltung?’, pp. 8 44. CSAS_A_1078948.3d (CSAS) (174£248mm) 17-08-2015 6:57 At the Fuzzy Edges of Fascism 130 5 continuous crisis and the potential for decay of the organic nation if that discipline and purity is not preserved.15 It was recently pointed out that the Indian scholarship on the emergence of a Hindu Right would do well to take seriously the writing of Alfred Rosenberg, who (unconventionally, for a socialist at the time) saw fascism as a mass movement of the Right and not merely as a distortion of bourgeois democracy caused by capitalism in crisis.16 This will prove to be a fruitful intervention. However, we are still looking mainly at the predecessors of the presentday Sangh Parivar, and the movement of ideas must be seen in a wider perspective than that. 135 The (Re)framing of Political Legitimacy 140 145 150 155 160 Methodologically, it is worth reiterating that the framing of the (re)presentation of ideas must be taken seriously: statements made, often in didactic mode, when a text seeks to present an idea, often regarded a priori as ‘foreign’, to a new audience. The texts themselves are often opaque without the framing statement to explain them. These framing statements are often contained in ‘paratexts’17 that help us situate the author(s), something of their proclaimed communicative intent, and the desired outcomes of their communication, which again is illuminative of much more than the content of the text. A preface or introduction might narrate, for instance, why national discipline, as practised in Fascist Italy, might be important for ‘nation-building’ in India,18 or why the ‘race-pride’ exhibited by Nazi Germany needed to be replicated in India, though directed against a different enemy.19 The political projects sought to be enabled by the text itself are enabled and legitimated by the framing that is suggested by the paratext. This becomes central to the use of the texts by readers as well as by various intermediaries for whom their own roles in the furthering of the didactic project are set out and clarified by the paratext. In this respect, the by-now proverbial ‘autonomy of the text’ is matched by an ‘autonomy of the paratext’, whose programmatic nature makes it important in its own right, apart from the text to which it is attached. In another respect, the paratext seeks to constrain the autonomy of the text by laying out the ways in which the text ought to be read and, therefore, to curtail the range of readings that might otherwise be available: the author of the paratext, whether or not s/he is the author of the text itself, seeks to maintain authorial control over the dissemination of meanings in the furtherance of particular didactic projects. Here is a case for not passing over the paratext quickly in our haste to get to the text, though of course this should not be a call to ignore the text. There are, however, also instances of the paratexts acquiring a life apart from the texts for which they were intended as paratexts, in these cases becoming texts themselves and even acquiring paratexts in their own right. These texts are to be found in English (the language in which many of these first appear) and in a number of 15 Michael Mann, Fascists (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. ix, sees a ‘family resemblance’ in terms of ‘organic nationalism, radical statism and paramilitarism’ between fascism and many tendencies not quite fascist as yet; in other words, he proposes a distinction that does not quite hold; italics in original. 16 Jairus Banaji, ‘Trajectories of Fascism: Extreme Right Movements in India and Elsewhere’, in Jairus Banaji (ed.), Fascism: Essays on Europe and India (Delhi: Three Essays Press, 2013), pp. 215 30. 17 See Gerard Genette and Marie Maclean, ‘Introduction to the Paratext’, in New Literary History, Vol. 22, no. 2 (Spring 1991), pp. 261 72. Paratexts include prefaces, introductions, guest forewords, communications among publishers, authors, translators and distributors, advertisements and their placing, and reviews quoted either in advertisements or in the books themselves. 18 See Zachariah, ‘Rethinking (the Absence of) Fascism in India’, pp. 190 2. 19 See M.S. Golwalkar, We or Our Nationhood Defined (Nagpur: Bharat Publications, 1939), although in the main text in Golwalkar’s case. CSAS_A_1078948.3d (CSAS) 6 165 170 175 180 185 190 195 200 (174£248mm) 17-08-2015 6:57 South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies Indian languages (languages into which they are often translated). Through this, the processes of mediation through which the attempt to domesticate and operationalise ‘foreign’ ideas,20 and the processes of legitimation or indices of legitimacy of politics in India, as also the relevant engagements of that politics, can be better understood. Another set of paratexts—acknowledgements, advertisements and institutional affiliations, for instance—point to the networks that disseminated similar sets of ideas and created the crossovers that enabled the movements and translations of ideas of which we are speaking here. The paratextual material leads us into an important set of debates about terms and concepts. It is often taken for granted that the same terms in the same language, or in selfevident translation, even when in use in different contexts, are more or less assimilable to one another or, in other words, that they refer to similar concepts. This is especially true for the modern world, certainly after the mid to late nineteenth century, where the consequences of European or American hegemony in matters social, political or academic have ensured that a few key concepts have been engaged with worldwide in broadly similar ways. What is often, therefore, overlooked is that the same terms might actually refer to different concepts, and similar concepts might be rendered by different terms. This could happen within a relatively stable linguistic context or time frame if variations such as class context or specialised usage are taken into account. But the question is pertinent in bilingual or multilingual contexts in a significant way. Let us take the case of an attempt to build a modern political vocabulary during colonial rule. There is, firstly, the question of how particular concepts are received by a group of people adept at using the new language: English, for the sake of our example. These adepts then, often self-consciously, look for parallels or similarities in their language in order to translate the new set of terms and become the mediators of a process of attempted domestication of the new language. In this process, two sets of concepts, in two linguistic milieux, are assimilated to one another and, in the process, gravitate towards one another. New institutional or statist forms were given invented parallels and predecessors in a Sanskritic world, terms were unearthed from an often mythologised, selectively unearthed and sanitised past, brought forward and equated with modern concepts that were expressed in the English language.21 This is of course a simplified model, but it begins to illustrate the problem of equating terms with concepts unproblematically, assuming relatively stable meanings. What we can in fact observe is an attempt to create, in a ‘native language’, a set of terms that express new ideas from a newly-acquired but desirable language. But the semantic range of the neologisms thus found might retain, especially to users without access to the new language, something of the old usages, or in the case where the neologism is completely new, not catch on at all.22 Equally, concepts are not transferred in some pristine form because they do not exist anywhere in a pristine form, constantly being negotiated and remade. The shift to a new context might result in the same term, in the same language, among one set of users (let us say one particular public domain) being used with reference to a concept that is subtly or significantly different from the concept among another set of users of the same term. 20 On ‘domestication’, see Dhruv Raina and S. Irfan Habib, Domesticating Modern Science: A Social History of Science and Culture in Colonial India (Delhi: Tulika, 2004). 21 For a good example of this, see Radhakumud Mookerji, Local Government in Ancient India (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1919); and Radhakumud Mookerji, Indian Shipping: A History of the Sea-Borne Trade and Maritime Activity of the Indians from the Earliest Times (London: Longman’s, Green & Co., 1912). 22 The reverse process, the incorporation of elements of the languages of the colonised into a new coloniser’s language, and the shifts in meaning this has undergone, has been observed at least as far back as the HobsonJobson in this particular case. CSAS_A_1078948.3d (CSAS) (174£248mm) 17-08-2015 6:57 At the Fuzzy Edges of Fascism 7 Volk and Authenticity: The Indigenist Imperative in Comparative Perspective 205 210 215 220 225 230 A near-perfect example of these processes can be found in the work of the academic innovator and political ideologue Benoy Kumar Sarkar, who made an attempt to create a whole language of the social sciences based on an ‘indigenous’, Indian set of concepts (Sanskrit-derived and, therefore, not exactly in contemporaneous use).23 Near-perfect examples are inconvenient precisely because they are so convenient and are, therefore, usually exceptional cases, but in Sarkar’s case, he became a spokesman for, and a link figure in, several networks of scholars, ideologues and political activists whose engagements ranged from the conservative to the radical Right. His is the voice, and pen, that links a religious reform movement of middleclass political nationalism in the Ramakrishna Mission and the godman Swami Vivekananda (recalling, if you will, the idea of a ‘political religion’ that some theorists on fascism have taken as central)24 with the imperialist fantasies of the Greater India Society; one might add he represents the project of a ‘Swadeshi’ intellectualism that sought, in a more sophisticated manner than the present-day Sangh Parivar but inexorably with a similar project, to present, and to perform, a glorious pre-colonial and predominantly ‘Hindu’ past for the Indian nationstate-to-be.25 Benoy Sarkar remains nonetheless a figure whose writings absorbed and incorporated many of the political ideologies of his age, not necessarily always because he was convinced of them, but because these were already legitimate frameworks through which he could communicate in the several languages (French, German, Italian, English, Bengali) in which he wrote and to the several publics he addressed. If he remained politically convinced of any creed, it was Nazism, to which he remained attached in public as late as 1942. Benoy Sarkar, who despite his open Nazism somehow seems to get a rather good press from academics working on India (all of whom absolve him of believing any of what he tried so hard to propagate), was not the only Indian with such a versatile academic and public life. A number of itinerant Indian intellectuals spent much of the early twentieth century wandering around the world, engaging variously with the diverse ideological currents of the time: examples of note, leaving aside those who explicitly placed themselves on the Left of the political spectrum, would have to include Sarkar’s fellow Swadeshi intellectual Tarak Nath Das, who was, by 1913, a US citizen and a spokesman for immigrants from India in North America;26 Har Dayal, Hindu-nationalist-turned-anarchistturned-Hindu-nationalist;27 and Maulvi Muhammad Barkatullah, Tokyo University Hindustani lecturer, Ghadr movement propagandist and unlikely co-conspirator of the Bolsheviks.28 We can 235 23 Benoy Kumar Sarkar’s revival is only just beginning. See Satadru Sen, Benoy Kumar Sarkar: Restoring the Nation to the World (Delhi: Routledge, 2015); Manu Goswami, ‘AHR Forum: Imaginary Futures and Colonial Internationalisms’, in American Historical Review, Vol. 117, no. 5 (2012), pp. 1461 85; and Kris Manjapra, Age of Entanglement: German and Indian Intellectuals Across Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), esp. pp. 143 60. Of these, only Satadru Sen has succeeded in bringing in something of a critical reading, for in the ambiguous aftermath of the ‘post-colonial’ moment, to be ‘international’ or ‘cosmopolitan’ or ‘transnational’ is apparently to be worthy of celebration in and of itself. 24 Emilio Gentile, The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996). 25 The classic work on the Swadeshi movement remains Sumit Sarkar, The Swadeshi Movement in 1903 1908 (New Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1973). 26 Hugh Johnstone, The Voyage of the Komagata Maru: The Sikh Challenge to Canada’s Colour Bar (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, rev. ed. 1914). 27 Benjamin Zachariah, ‘A Long, Strange Trip: The Lives in Exile of Har Dayal’, in South Asian History and Culture, Vol. 4, no. 4 (2013), pp. 574 92; and the biography by Emily Brown, Har Dayal: Hindu Revolutionary and Rationalist (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1975). 28 G. Adhikari (ed.), Documents of the Communist Party of India, Vol. 1 (Delhi: People’s Publishing House, n.d.). CSAS_A_1078948.3d (CSAS) 8 235 240 245 250 255 260 265 270 (174£248mm) 17-08-2015 6:57 South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies multiply the examples greatly, especially if we are to include lesser figures to whom the spotlights of history have been less kind. That Benoy Kumar Sarkar was an early enthusiast of Italian fascism who moved gracefully on to Nazism as an enthusiastic supporter of the alleged innovations of Hitler’s Germany, and of various aspects of Nazi politics, should be quite well known by now. 29 Sarkar welcomed the elevation of Hitler to power, writing that ‘Hitler is the greatest of Germany’s teachers and inspirers since Fichte’,30 and elaborating that: What Young Germany needed badly was the moral idealism of a Vivekananda multiplied by the iron strenuousness of a Bismarck. And that has been furnished by Hitler, armed as he is with two among other spiritual slogans, namely, self-sacrifice and fatherland.31 Sarkar saw the Jewish question as a Kulturkampf in the manner of the Catholic confrontation with the Bismarckian state, which he said no one heard of any more today because Bismarck had solved the problem. In a similar manner‚ ‘The Jewish question…[will] be liquidated in Nazi Germany in a few years’.32 There is no obvious indication here that Sarkar had anything like the physical liquidation of Jews in mind. The need for Nazi action against Jews was allegedly because of the ‘over-Judaization of the public institutions in Berlin as well as in other cities’, which made it necessary to ‘purge the public institutions of the Jews and ordain for them a legitimate proportion of the services not exceeding the demographic percentage’.33 In earlier times, Benoy Sarkar would also have been a logical volunteer for Right-wing mobilisational attempts among Indians in Germany and attempts by the German Right to move towards them. Fundamentally sympathetic towards a Germany humiliated and dispossessed of its colonies after the Versailles peace settlement, he stated that Germany would be a hope for the liberation of the colonies of other powers since Germany was now a non-possessor of colonies: It now remains for Germany to speak out and act in the manner in which the Orient expects that a great race bent on the revindication of its claims should act both for its own honour and national self-assertion as well as for opening out new vistas in international relations and world-culture. The infiniteward energism of the ‘Fausts’ of Young Asia as well as their Siegfried-like sadhana (Streben) for freedom will supply the Volksseele of Germania not only with its spiritual nourishment but will also furnish for it a bracing milieu of hopefulness and the perennial springs of creative youth.34 In 1923, the ‘Bavarian extremist leader Hitler’, as British intelligence then referred to him, was attempting to mobilise various maverick intellectuals from Turkey, Egypt and India 29 Giuseppe Flora, Benoy Kumar Sarkar and Italy: Culture, Politics, and Economic Ideology (Delhi: Italian Embassy Cultural Centre, 1994). 30 Benoy Kumar Sarkar, The Hitler State: A Landmark in the Political, Economic and Social Remaking of the German People (Calcutta: Insurance and Finance Review, 1933), p. 4. 31 Ibid., p. 13. Vivekananda, the first international godman produced by India, famously presented ‘Hinduism’ to an international audience at the 1893 Congress of Religions in Chicago. 32 Ibid., p. 31. 33 Ibid. 34 Benoy Kumar Sarkar, ‘Asia and Eur-America’, in Benoy Kumar Sarkar, The Futurism of Young Asia and Other Essays on the Relations between the East and the West (Berlin: Julius Springer, 1922), p. 37. CSAS_A_1078948.3d (CSAS) (174£248mm) 17-08-2015 6:57 At the Fuzzy Edges of Fascism 275 280 285 290 295 9 behind his new party.35 Mussolini’s Italian Fascists initially had more recruits among Indians. But both ideological and organisational Indo-German Nazi connections were formed reasonably early. In 1928, an Indisches Ausschuss or India Institute of the parent organisation, the Deutsche Akademie, itself founded in 1925, was established.36 The co-founders of the India Institute were Dr. Karl Haushofer, a specialist in ‘geopolitics’ and one of the popularisers of the theory of ‘Lebensraum’37 so beloved of the National Socialists, and the Bengali nationalist Tarak Nath Das.38 Along with Benoy Kumar Sarkar, Das had been part of the National Council of Education in Bengal, which had debated a ‘Swadeshi’ curriculum for an Indian education that would be free from the domination of colonial models of education, but they were also interested in the basis of an ‘authentic’ Indian nationalism. The Deutsche Akademie’s India Institute awarded scholarships to about a hundred Indian students between 1929 and 1938. The Institute also became active in pro-German propaganda during the Nazi period. It was incorporated into the NSDAP Auslands-Organisation (NSDAP-AO)39 and was instrumental in starting Nazi cells in various firms in Calcutta which were under German control. It also funded German lektors who taught German to Indian students desirous of coming to Germany.40 Among the other Indians closely associated with the Institute in Munich were Benoy Kumar Sarkar and Ashok Bose, the nephew of the future collaborator with Nazism, Subhas Chandra Bose.41 A stream of Indian students continued to pass through German universities and polytechnics throughout the 1930s, many of whom were to a greater or lesser extent impressed by the Nazis; the India Institute of the Deutsche Akademie continued to fund a number of these and to provide back-up support.42 Tarak Nath Das and Benoy Kumar Sarkar continued to be associated with an extended circle of Nazis in the new Reich, not least through the Deutsche Akademie.43 Some of the students returned to a home university which also had by this time some institutionalised support for National Socialism, such as Benares Hindu University or Aligarh Muslim University or Calcutta University, where Benoy Kumar Sarkar was the leading light of its German Club.44 35 L/PJ/ 12/102, 1923, f. 2, India Office Records, British Library, London (hereafter IOR). R51/1-16 & 144, Bundesarchiv, Berlin. 37 The term ‘Lebensraum’, borrowed from a biological idea of habitat, was used to make the claim that the German Volk needed more space for itself and was entitled to expand its territories. 38 This is acknowledged in the official history of the Institute, to be found at Indien-Institut e.V. M€unchen [http:// www.indien-institut.de/en/chronicle, accessed 20 April 2013]. Note the sudden jump over the Nazi period: nothing is said for the time between 1932 and 1946. 39 The NSDAP was the National Socialist German Workers Party. 40 ‘Strictly Secret: An Examination of the Activities of the Auslands Organization of the National Socialistische Deutsche Arbeiter Partei (sic), Part II: In India’, Indian Political Intelligence (IPI), file L/PJ/12/505, ff. 80-81, IOR. 41 Publicity materials for the India Institute, Munich, distributed on the occasion of its 75th anniversary in 2003, do not mention Ashok Bose or Benoy Kumar Sarkar. An earlier version of the Indien-Institut’s website did list their names [http://www.indien-institut.de, accessed 20 May 2010], but this has been replaced by the version cited above. Leonard Gordon, Brothers Against the Raj: A Biography of Indian Nationalists Sarat and Subhas Chandra Bose (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), pp. 256 7, mentions Ashok Bose’s presence in Munich from 1931 as a student of applied chemistry. Benoy Sarkar was also a regular contributor to Karl Haushofer’s journal, Geopolitik. 42 R51/16, Bundesarchiv, Berlin. Records of students are few and far between, and it is unclear as to whether they were obliterated by the vicissitudes of war or were deliberately destroyed. 43 ‘Akademie zur wissenschaftliche Erforschung und zur Pflege des Deutschtums’, R51/1, rules of the association, 1925, end of file, n.p.g, Bundesarchiv, Berlin. 44 Home Department (Special), files 830A, 1939 and 830(i), 1939, Maharashtra State Archives, Bombay. See also Eugene D’Souza, ‘Nazi Propaganda in India’, in Social Scientist, Vol. 28, no. 5/6 (May June 2000), pp. 77 90, based on the above two files, but lacking a context for them. 36 CSAS_A_1078948.3d (CSAS) 10 (174£248mm) 17-08-2015 6:57 South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies To consider Sarkar merely a Nazi is to fail to attribute agency to an extremely creative individual. But to see him merely as an extremely creative individual—even as he became the spokesman for many of his generation, and indeed precisely because of that—is to miss the wider points. One strand of thinking in India always wished to hold on to the alleged spiritual core of ‘Indian’ civilisation, to amplify its anti-individualism, and to develop its v€ olkisch elements—without necessarily asserting that Indian civilisation was otherworldly and spiritual.45 The renewal and strengthening of a ‘nation’ otherwise liable to decay ought to come from the ‘folk-element’: this was understood and actively promoted in India.46 Similarly influential was the organicist idea of a nation, combined with a militarist understanding of mass mobilisation in the period leading up to and after World War I;47 this fantasy of military prowess drew on emotional responses to British insults about the effeminacy of Indians, and of Bengalis in particular,48 and can be seen in the hypermasculinity of Subhas Chandra Bose’s plagiarism of the design of Mussolini’s uniform, boots and all, for his own use as he strutted around on horseback as the leader of the Bengal Volunteers during the 1928 Calcutta Congress.49 A longer interest in reviving ‘Arya Dharm’ or the ‘Hindu race’, and linking it up with European, and Theosophical, understandings of the Aryan ‘race’ as the most evolved of the historically great races, and of Indian attempts to link up with these discussions as resources of legitimation, played a long-term role in mobilising potential recruits to an Aryanism that the Nazis also mobilised to good effect.50 The Aryanism of the Theosophists was of interest and importance to early Nazi formations in Germany and Austria.51 Benoy Sarkar’s professed need for a return to authenticity, which we might productively read as similar to, but militantly separate from Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj,52 thus stood in a long tradition of colonial Indian thinking, and about the pre-existence of worthwhile and at least potentially modern historical examples and institutions in (mostly ancient) India. Sarkar was more original, better read and, thus, less prone to using the crudest and most obvious examples for his arguments, avoiding the idea that there was a pure and untouched essence to ‘India’, but much of the driving force in his writing is an almost post-colonialist insistence that India could provide or had provided the world with great and worthwhile intellectual products. He extended this argument to whatever would hold it, on one occasion reminding readers that Nietzsche, whose idea of the Will to 300 305 310 315 320 325 45 Q3 In this connection, see Sarkar, The Futurism of Young Asia and Other Essays, esp. the title essay, ‘The Futurism of Young Asia’, pp. 1 22. 46 See also Sayantani Adhikary, ‘The Bratachari Movement and the Invention of a “Folk Tradition”’, in this volume. 47 Roy, ‘Youth, Paramilitary Organisations and National Discipline in South Asia, c. 1915 1950’. 48 Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The ‘Manly Englishman’ and the ‘Effeminate Bengali’ in the Late Nineteenth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995); and John Rosselli, ‘The Self-Image of Effeteness: Physical Education and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Bengal’, in Past & Present, no. 86 (Feb. 1980), pp. 121 48. 49 Pictures of this iconic moment abound; the uniform itself is centrally displayed in a glass case at Netaji Bhavan, Subhas Bose’s former residence in Calcutta, now a museum. 50 For the larger argument behind this, see Zachariah, ‘The Invention of Hinduism for National Use’, pp. 153 204. 51 See, for instance, Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, The Occult Roots of Nazism: Secret Aryan Cults and Their Influence on Nazi Ideology (New York: New York University Press, 1992); and Eric Kurlander, ‘The Orientalist Roots of National Socialism? Nazism, Occultism, and South Asian Spirituality, 1919 1945’, in Joanne Miyang Cho, Eric Kurlander and Douglas T. McGetchin (eds), Transcultural Encounters between Germany and India: Kindred Spirits in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (London: Routledge, 2014), pp. 155 69. 52 Benjamin Zachariah, Developing India: An Intellectual and Social History, c. 1930 1950 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 168 73, makes this point about the Swadeshi context for Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj. CSAS_A_1078948.3d (CSAS) (174£248mm) 17-08-2015 6:57 At the Fuzzy Edges of Fascism 11 Power he greatly admired, had learned his philosophy from the Manusmriti and his politics from the Arthashastra.53 ‘To the folk-element of all ages in India’ is the dedication for his book The Folk Element in Hindu Culture.54 ‘In the reconstruction of Indian history, modern scholarship has to be devoted more and more to the exposition of the influence that the masses of the country have ever exerted in the making of its civilization’, Benoy Sarkar programmatically declared.55 To understand this folk element, one must have undergone an ‘initiation amongst the folk’.56 He then made a number of points in advance of the main text, and understandably so, because the text itself is intimidatingly technical and opaque: 330 335 1. The masses and the folk have contributed to the making of Hindu Culture in all its phases no less than the court and the classes (sic). 2. Secular, material and social interests, as contrasted with the other-worldly and spiritual ideals, have had considerable influence in moulding Hindu life and thought. 3. The caste-system has never been a disintegrating factor in Hindu communal existence, and is most probably a very recent institution. 4. Hinduism is an eclectic and ever-expansive socio-religious system built up through the assimilation of diverse ethnic, natural and spiritual forces during the successive ages of Indian history. 5. There has ever been an attempt to govern the folk-customs, popular faith, image-worship and public festivals by the transcendental conceptions of the Divinity of Man and the Transitoriness of this World. The folklore of the Hindus is nothing but the adaptation of their metaphysical culture-lore to the instincts and aptitudes of the ‘man in the street’. …57 340 345 There was, thus, a glorification of a sort of instinctive folk wisdom that was more authentic than all the cultural sophistication of supposed higher forms—students of various Right-wing populisms would find this theme readily recognisable. Culturally, Sarkar further declared, there could be discerned a continuity across Asia of folk forms of religion, which meant that distinctions made between Buddhist, Saiva and Vaisnava did not hold.58 This was more or less a corollary to the ‘Greater India’ arguments made by some of his colleagues, whom he cited approvingly in his books and who, likewise, cited him approvingly in theirs,59 who argued from the presence of Hindu and Buddhist monuments in South-East Asia that a ‘Greater India’ of a cultural and economic expansionist sort could be discerned in the history of those 350 355 53 Q4 Benoy Kumar Sarkar, ‘The Influence of India on Western Civilisation’, in Journal of Race Development, Vol. 9, (1918 19), pp. 101 2. Originally, this was an address given at Columbia University, New York, in April 1918. 54 Benoy Kumar Sarkar, ‘Dedication’, The Folk-Element in Hindu Culture: A Contribution to Socio-Religious Studies in Hindu Folk-Institutions (London: Longman’s, Green & Co., 1917). 55 ‘Preface’, ibid., p. vii. 56 Ibid., p. ix, quoting Professor R.R. Marrett’s paper ‘Folklore and Psychology’, read before the London Folklore Society. 57 Ibid., p. x. 58 Ibid., p. xvi. See also Benoy Kumar Sarkar, Chinese Religion Through Hindu Eyes: A Study in the Tendencies of Asiatic Mentality (Shanghai: The Commercial Press, 1916), from which he quotes at length in the ‘Preface’ to The Folk Element in Hindu Culture. 59 See Mookerji, Indian Shipping; Radhakamal Mukherji, Borderlands of Economics (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1925); and author’s ‘Preface’ in Sarkar, The Folk Element in Hindu Culture. It should be noted that they do not merely cite each other’s works in a few footnotes, they declare their intellectual debts and allegiances strongly. CSAS_A_1078948.3d (CSAS) 12 360 365 370 375 380 (174£248mm) 17-08-2015 6:57 South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies countries.60 A sort of spiritual Lebensraum thus opened out for Greater India. The connections among the scholars of the ‘Greater India Society’, based in Calcutta, Visva Bharati, Allahabad or Benares Hindu University, should be noted, and for their popularisers, notably the Hindu Mahasabha supporter and publisher journalist Ramananda Chatterjee, there was a territorially bounded India that was ‘Hindu’ and eternal, but the ‘culture’ of India was entitled to move freely and colonise other parts of the world. The ‘folk-element’ argument solved another problem of inventing a nation: upper-caste Hindu textual or scriptural traditions would yield nothing of the numbers required in a nationbuilding game. Meanwhile, non-caste Hinduism, if appropriated through this idea of folk practices, could provide an idea of the organicist unity of the community that was to become the nation. And the fantasy of mobilising the masses from above without losing control was greatly enabled by the hope of an organic national discipline of the Volk. We should pause here to outline the affinities of ideology or ideas that had longer, nineteenth and early twentieth century, pre-fascist histories. It is necessary at least to note their existence. It is also far from obvious in which directions the ideas ‘flowed’: if some Nazi mysticism had ‘Indian’ roots, and ideas of Aryan civilisation or supremacy transcended the barriers of ‘West’ and ‘East’, this was to be expected, as the public arenas of ‘West’ and ‘East’ were not sealed off from one another, nor indeed separated in any way but polemically. And if the exact relationships between v€ olkisch, organicist and fascist ideas are not clear, with eclectic sets of ideas co-existing in the writings of users of Volk as a category (psychoanalysis, biology, race),61 we could say with some certainty that the former sets of ideas were definitely a part of a fascist repertoire, even if they were not only elements of a fascist repertoire. There was a performative authenticity in recreating displays of v€ olkisch energy in public: these were ideas as practices as much as they were ideas turned into practices, as the folk ‘revival’ of Benoy Sarkar’s friend and co-conversationalist Gurusaday Dutt sought to mobilise.62 Leading the ‘Folk Element’ 385 390 But the ‘folk element’ on its own was not exactly to be given autonomy without leadership being exercised strongly on its behalf, and upon it. Benoy Sarkar’s appreciation of the movement of the holy man Ramakrishna and his educated middle-class disciple Vivekananda is worth looking at again in this connection. It might be recalled that Vivekananda’s importance to India was Sarkar’s comparative yardstick for the importance of Hitler to Germany. In a pamphlet derived from a speech and published in 1936,63 Benoy Sarkar’s Ramakrishna is a v€ olkisch hero and his Vivekananda is a Germanic romantic. Of the unlettered guru Ramakrishna, Benoy Sarkar wrote: 60 On the Greater India Society, see Susan Bayly, ‘Imagining “Greater India”: French and Indic Visions of Colonialism in the Indic Mode’, in Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 38, no. 3 (2004), pp. 703 44, and also current work by Jolita Zabarskaite, ‘Greater India in Indian Scholarship and in the Public Domain’, unpublished paper. I am grateful to the author for sharing this with me. 61 Mukherji, Borderlands of Economics. 62 Frank Korom, ‘Gurusaday Dutt, Vernacular Nationalism, and the Folk Culture Revival in Colonial Bengal’, in Firoze Mahmud and Sharani Zaman (eds), Folklore in Context (Dhaka: The University Press, 2010), pp. 256 93; Frank Korom, ‘Inventing Traditions: Folklore and Nationalism as Historical Process in Bengal’, in D. Rohtman-Augustin and M. Pourzqhovic (eds), Folklore and Historical Process (Zagreb: Institute of Folklore Research, 1989), pp. 59 83. 63 Benoy Kumar Sarkar, The Might of Man in the Social Philosophy of Ramakrishna and Vivekananda (Mylapore, Madras: Sri Ramakrishna Math, 1936), printed at the Commercial Gazette Press by J. Lahiri, 6, Parsi Bagan Lane, Calcutta 2. CSAS_A_1078948.3d (CSAS) (174£248mm) 17-08-2015 6:57 At the Fuzzy Edges of Fascism 13 Neither the category ‘world-forces’, nor the category, ‘nationalism’, would have conveyed any meaning to his life. And yet his Kathamrita, ‘the nectar of words’ (1882 86), has turned out to be the most dynamic social philosophy of the age, and this has created for him a position of one of the great ‘remakers’ of mankind.64 395 Ramakrishna, for Benoy Sarkar, epitomised the ‘folk’. His was a ‘folk-language’, his wisdom was ‘folk-wisdom’, his logic, ‘folk-logic’.65 His message of the equality of faiths, of heterogeneous roads to freedom, laid deeper foundations for ‘inter-racial’ harmony. But Ramakrishna was also somewhat akin to Fichte: 400 Fichte’s attitudes are well-known. Writing in 1808 for Young Germany he said: ‘Euch ist das groessere Geschick zuieil (sic) geworden, uberhaupt (sic) das Reich des Geistes und der Vernunft zu begruenden (To you has been assigned the greater destiny, namely, that you have to establish the Empire of the spirit and reason), und die rohe koerperliche Gewalt insgesamt als beherrschendes der Welt zu vernichten (and that you have to annihilate raw physical power as a determinant of the world)’. It is this supremacy of the spirit and reason, and the emancipation of the mind from matter, or rather the mind’s dominion over the world that constitutes the Leitmotif of Ramakrishna’s sayings.66 405 In this synthesis of the transcendental and the positive he is but a chip of the old Hindu block coming down from the Vedic, and perhaps still earlier times… . And it is on the strength of this synthesis, again, that his Narendra, the Vivekananda thundered a Young India into being, the India of economic energism as well as of spiritual creativeness, of material science and technocracy as well as of self-control and social service.67 410 415 The ‘moral and spiritual values’ of Ramakrishna and Vivekananda ‘were destined to constitute the living religion of our country, of our masses and classes, during the present century.68 In those contexts Vivekananda was described as the Carlyle of Young India and credited with the gospel of Napoleonic energism and triumphant defiance of the Western chauvinists’.69 Vivekananda was ‘an Avatar of youth-force’, a socialist (but not like Marx, rather a romantic socialist like St. Simon), a nationalist and an internationalist, who ‘served to establish the universalistic, cosmopolitan and humane basis of all religious and social values’. He was, ‘like Fichte, the father of the German youth-movement, an exponent of nationalism and socialism’, preaching the ‘gospel…of energism, of mastery over the world, over the conditions surrounding life, of human freedom, of individual liberty, of courage trampling down cowardice, of world-conquest’, just as the West was ‘groping in the dark’ for a solution along 420 425 Q5 Q6 64 Sarkar, The Might of Man, p. 1. Sarkar cited himself, referring to his ‘Bengali Positivism in the Sociology of Values’, Calcutta Review (Jan. 1936). 65 Ibid., p. 4. 66 Ibid., p. 9. 67 Ibid., pp. 11 2. Sarkar cited himself again, referring to his Positive Background of Hindu Sociology, Vols. 1 2 (Allahabad: 1914, and 1921, 1926); and The Political Institutions of the Hindus (Leipzig: 1922). 68 Sarkar, The Might of Man, pp. 12 3. Again, citing himself, he says that he had anticipated this more than two decades ago in his Vishwa-Shakti (World Forces) (Calcutta, 1914, first published in the Grihastha, Calcutta, 1913). 69 Sarkar, The Might of Man, p. 12. CSAS_A_1078948.3d (CSAS) 14 (174£248mm) 17-08-2015 6:57 South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies those lines. Nietzsche’s Also Sprach Zarathustra ‘had awakened mankind to the need for a more positive, humane and joyous life’s philosophy than that of the New Testament’. Vivekananda was a ‘pioneer of a revolution’ and ‘the positive and constructive counterpart’ to Nietzsche’s ‘destructive criticism’. The doctrine of ‘energism, moral freedom, individual liberty, and man’s mastery over the circumstances of life’ was promulgated by Immanuel Kant and, later, by Robert Browning. The ancients already had the Upanishads and the Gita.70 Oswald Spengler, in his Untergang des Abendlandes, had been interested in the transformation of epochs: 430 in what the Hindus would call Yugantara, in the ‘cultures yet to be’. In so far as Spengler is looking for the ‘new element of inwardness’ such as can sponsor the regeneration of life for the ‘world-historical phase of several centuries upon which we ourselves are entering’, he is echoing the Vivekanandist doctrine of Man-born-toconquer-Naturism.71 435 Sarkar’s parallels between Indian and German history are slightly strained—he cites Karl Haushofer in connection with being superior to many, inferior to a few, but not among the last72—and in his summary of Vivekananda’s message to the Bengali people, Sarkar quotes an 1897 speech ‘seven or eight years before the Bengali “ideas of 1905” take a definite shape’. Vivekananda’s speech in Benoy Sarkar’s summary goes like this: 440 ‘We have to conquer the world’, he declares, ‘That we have to! India must conquer the world and nothing less than that is my ideal. It may be very big, it may astonish many of you, but it is so. We must conquer the world or die. There is no other alternative. The sign of life is expansion; we must go out, expand, show life or degrade, fester and die. There is no other alternative’.73 445 In this context, citing Haushofer begins to make sense. Sarkar celebrates the fact that the Ramakrishna Mission has begun to expand all over the world: Britain, Spain, Czechoslovakia, Poland, France and Germany all have editions of Ramakrishna’s and Vivekananda’s works. ‘It is but the six thousand year old Indian tradition of digvijaya, World-conquest, and elevation of the most diverse races and classes to soul-enfranchising ideals and activities that Vivekananda and after him the Swamis of the Ramakrishna Order have been pursuing under modern conditions, thereby exhibiting the virility and strenuousness of Hindu humanism and spirituality’.74 450 455 Akhand Bharat and ‘Greater India’ We should recall here the invention of an Aryan Volk via Theosophy and neo-Hinduism (with borrowings from the Orientalists), in order to stress the ambiguities of the appropriation.75 460 70 Ibid., pp. 15 7. Ibid., pp. 17 8. 72 Ibid., p. 24. Here, there is a citation of Karl Haushofer, Jenseits der Grossmaechte (Leipzig: 1932), p. 489. 73 Sarkar, The Might of Man, p. 25. 74 Ibid., p. 28. Citations on this point inevitably include himself: The Futurism of Young Asia (Berlin: 1922), as well as P.T. Hoffmann, Der indische und der deutsche Geist von Herder bis zur Romantik (Tuebingen: 1915); and Helmut von Glasenapp, Indien in der Dichtung und Forschung des deutschen Ostens (Koenigsburg: 1930). 75 Zachariah, ‘The Invention of Hinduism for National Use’, pp. 153 204. 71 Q7 Q8 Q9 Q10 CSAS_A_1078948.3d (CSAS) (174£248mm) 17-08-2015 6:57 At the Fuzzy Edges of Fascism 460 15 Towards the close of World War II, with the ‘Pakistan’ claim endangering the apparently organic unity of ‘India’, the historian Radhakumud Mookerji found himself the spokesman for the protagonists of an undivided India or Akhand Bharat as president of the Akhand Bharat Conference at Lucknow University in January 1945. He declared: I must assert once for all on behalf of Hindus, and with all the emphasis that I can command as President of this All India Conference of Hindu leaders, that the homeland of the Hindus through milenniums of their history has been nothing short of the whole of India stretching in its continental expanse from Kashmir to the Cape, from Nanga Parvat and Amarnath to Madura and Bameshwaram and from Dwarka to Puri. The Hindus through the ages have built up the whole of this continent as their sacred, inviolable, and indivisible Mother Country and infused into it their very blood. Since the days of the Rigveda, the earliest work of India and of the world, since the dawn of history, the Aryan Hindus have conquered and civilised this continent and breathed into it their very soul.76 465 470 He then makes peculiar use of a well-known terminological argument: 475 the term HINDU is not a religious but a territorial term, and any native of India, according to Persians is a HINDU. Historically, every Muslim is a Hindu, and we may give the quietus to all communal problems on this basis by taking India as the country of one Nation called the Hindus.77 There follows a geographical argument to add to the terminological one: 480 India has been fashioned by Nature as an indisputable geographical unit marked out from the rest of the world by well-defined boundaries and fixed frontiers about which there can be no doubt or uncertainty.78 485 490 Belonging to ‘India’ thus was a matter of Blut und Boden, quite literally: a ‘natural’ geography and sacred ties of blood made India an indivisible whole. In his earlier work, Radhakumud Mookerji—who always warmly thanked Benoy Kumar Sarkar in the acknowledgements and prefaces to his various books—claimed that ‘India’ had always been a unity and, indeed, that ancient India already had had a nationalism.79 His Nationalism in Hindu Culture was, unsurprisingly, a Theosophical publication, given that the Theosophical Society played a major role in defining ‘Hinduism’ as a system, a world religion and civilisation, and as ‘Aryan’, and even, through Annie Besant’s Central Hindu College in Benares (the predecessor of Benares Hindu University), prescribed what Hinduism was.80 76 Radhakumud Mookerji, Akhand Bharat (Bombay: Hind Kitabs, Feb. 1945), pp. 4 5. Ibid., p. 8. 78 Ibid., p. 9. Earlier work, which he cites, includes his own The Fundamental Unity of India (From Hindu Sources) (1913). Many of these started as articles in Dawn or Modern Review, making for a very erudite exclusivism underpinned by impeccable Swadeshi credentials. 79 Radhakumud Mookerji, The Fundamental Unity of India (From Hindu Sources) (London: Longman’s, Green & Co., 1914); Radhakumud Mookerji, Nationalism in Hindu Culture (London: Theosophical Publishing House, 1921); and Radhakumud Mookerji, Local Government in Ancient India (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2nd ed., 1920). 80 See Leah Renold, A Hindu Education: Early Years of the Benares Hindu University (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005). 77 CSAS_A_1078948.3d (CSAS) 16 495 500 (174£248mm) 17-08-2015 6:57 South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies Aryan Path, the journal of the Theosophical Lodge of India, led by the sometime labour organiser and Parsi Theosophist B.P. Wadia, introduced Kalidas Nag’s article on ‘Greater India’ as recalling Madame Blavatsky’s statement in Isis Unveiled ‘that “India was the AlmaMater, not only of the civilization, arts, and sciences, but also of all the great religions of antiquity”’.81 Mookerji was a member of the Greater India Society, his early book Indian Shipping having centrally dealt with the importance of ‘greater India’ to mainland India,82 as had his colleague Romesh Chandra Majumdar’s Ancient Indian Colonies in the Far East.83 There seems to have been no contradiction seen in asserting an India with a community of blood and within boundaries ‘fashioned by Nature’, and celebrating the spilling out of these boundaries into an Asia that was a ‘Greater India’ in an earlier phase of Indian colonial greatness. Some Conclusions 505 510 515 520 525 The Volk and the organic unity of the nation were, as every ‘nation-builder’ knew, to be created if necessary via eugenic efforts and national disciplinary formations. The alleged honesty of a ‘folk’ religion as the true expression of the people was an attractive solution to the problem of organic unity, but this true expression was always to be interpreted by relevant and capable authorities. Theorists of fascism speak of ‘palingenesis’ or national rebirth in terms of the importance of building the community or nation to be, as recovery from or recompense for historic injustice.84 This would apply quite clearly to India. Affinities with fascism generically are quite evident, and this route to fascism was not a matter of imitation, but of a shared set of assumptions and thinking. Of the chaotic and sometimes contradictory and unresolved thoughts represented in the attempts at systematic thinking of even the best intellectuals of the times, we might say that much of this is at best a fascist direction. And, indeed, it is possible to choose better examples if one is but searching for unambiguously fascist ones. But the point of this essay is to show that the concerns, anxieties, themes and assumptions behind many fascist ideas, and even more ideas that were close to fascism, existed in an ‘Indian’ set of public debates that were not, and could not have been, purely ‘Indian’. A process of the unfolding of Ann€ aherungsm€ oglichkeiten—the possibilities of coming closer together—with European fascisms that we are happier to recognise as fascism did not, therefore, depend entirely on a process of copying ideas, imperfectly or otherwise; or in another formulation, if Indians were not to be merely consumers of ‘modernity’, but also its producers, why does this not apply to fascism as well?85 Perhaps equally importantly, in dealing with a question such as the fascist propensities of a political order, it is necessary to treat genealogy and teleology together, writing history backwards as well as forwards, as I suggested earlier. This is why my choice of presentation of texts and debates in this essay does 81 Aryan Path (Jan. 1933), p. 3. On the ‘Greater India’ idea, see Kalidas Nag, Greater India: A Study in Indian Internationalism (Calcutta: Greater India Society Bulletin No. 1, November 1926). 83 R.C. Majumdar, Ancient Indian Colonies in the Far East, Vol. 1: Champa (Lahore: Punjab Sanskrit Book Depot, 1927). 84 Roger Griffin, The Nature of Fascism (London: Routledge, 1991), p. ix. 85 Why must Indians simply be reduced to the role of perpetual consumers of modernity, and not its producers (to borrow an argument from elsewhere)? Partha Chatterjee, ‘Whose Imagined Communities?’, The Nation and its Fragments (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 3 13. I am not sure Chatterjee was referring to fascism, but the argument can usefully be transposed to deal with fascism. 82 CSAS_A_1078948.3d (CSAS) (174£248mm) 17-08-2015 6:57 At the Fuzzy Edges of Fascism 530 17 not follow a chronological framework in any simple way: there is not a ‘before and after fascism’ tale to be told in any unproblematic way. As regards fascism, of those who saw the implications of their ideas and their actions, some pulled back. Others did not. A distinctively Indian fascism was and is possible, but is still recognisable as a generic fascism. If we are to understand it as different, we need to understand what it is different from and, therefore, we must have comparative parameters.