Books | Complexities of History

Vanya Vaidehi Bhargav

In a 1902 newspaper article titled ‘Hindu nationalism’, Lajpat Rai had claimed that Hindus had historically possessed a sense of nationality, and advanced as proof a historical narrative of ancient and early medieval Hindu empires as well as Hindu resistance to ‘foreign’ Muslim rule. Even then Lajpat Rai’s history had lacked the Savarkarite Hindutva emphasis on ceaseless, inevitable conflict and warfare between Hindus and Muslims, nor had it viewed Muslim rule as marked by the intention to defile and eradicate Hinduism, or dominate and humiliate Hindus. Still, his argument had broadly presaged, by two decades, the narrative of Indian history constructed by Savarkar from the war years—in its assumptions that Hindu nationality crystallized during resistance to Muslim rule, of the indigenous nature of the Hindu nation against the foreignness of Muslims, and its presentation of the historical relationship of Hindus and Muslims as consisting merely of opposition. This historical narrative had matched Lajpat Rai’s conceptualization of Hindus and Muslims as separate, competitive ‘nationalities’, and his indifference towards providing them with a common identity or unity.

After 1915, Lajpat Rai moved in a different direction. In light of his new ‘Indian’ nationalist imagination, he felt the need to revisit and reinterpret the medieval Persianate period of India’s history. Rather than underscoring how the Hindu nation was actualized while resisting Muslim rule, this new historical narrative attempted to counter portrayals of Muslim rule as foreign and as a period marked by domination, oppression and antagonism. The period of ‘Muslim rule’ was re-imagined as one involving socio-cultural interaction, political equality, religious tolerance and concord, and even exemplifying virtuous Indian self-governance.

To be sure, in his account of India’s past in Young India, Lajpat Rai retained hi