Ananya Vajpeyi. Righteous Republic

Righteous Republic is centrally concerned with exploring the construction of the self in the works of five important thinkers of modern India—Mohandas Gandhi, Rabindranath Tagore, Abanindranath Tagore, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Bhimrao Ambedkar. The category “swaraj,” commonly translated as self-rule, came to be at the very heart of political discourse in modern India as the anticolonial movement against British rule developed over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Isolating the category of “swa” or “self” from that of “raj” or “rule,” Ananya Vajpeyi states that since the question of sovereignty or political “rule” had already been sufficiently explored in existing scholarship, she chose to focus on the question of the “self,” a much-neglected topic in the historiography of modern India. This book seeks to build on a relatively recent trend in the scholarship of modern India that has focused on the critical role played by Indian intellectual traditions and their categories in the works of important thinkers. Vajpeyi contends that the modern Indian “self” that came into being in the twentieth century was not simply derived from Western intellectual and cultural categories, as is commonly assumed, but rather emerged through a deep and critical engagement with premodern Sanskrit and other intellectual and aesthetic traditions, texts, categories, and monuments. Each of the five chapters is focused on one thinker, whose works are organized around a central category from the Sanskrit intellectual tradition: ahimsa (nonviolence) for Gandhi, viraha (longing) for Rabindranath Tagore, samvega (shock) for Abanindranath Tagore, dharma (norm) and artha (purpose) for Nehru, and duhkha (suffering) for Ambedkar. Vajpeyi contends that it was in and through their engagement with classical texts and traditions that these thinkers constructed “a solid plinth of moral selfhood and ethical sovereignty” that constitutes modern India's “distinct historical identity in the world” (p. 10).

Art · Buddhism · Dharma · Economic history · Historiography · Intellectual history · Literature · Political science · Politics · Sanskrit · Scholarship · Sovereignty · Theology · Chinese history and philosophy · Classics · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Philosophy · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies