A thoroughly original, high quality and path-breaking contribution to Indian intellectual history. -- Pratap Bhanu Mehta, Centre for Policy Research Swaraj, the key term in Indian nationalism, refers to the self. But what is this self that is the subject of Indian self-rule? Ananya Vajpeyi retraces the field of modern Indian political thought to analyze the answers offered by five canonical figures. Her work is original, acute, sensitive, frequently unconventional, and always delightfully readable. -- Partha Chatterjee, Columbia University In a series of sophisticated and original readings, Ananya Vajpeyi paints an arresting picture of the moral imaginary inside the tradition of modern Indian political thought. Against the grain of much recent interpretation, Vajpeyi argues that modern Indian political thought should be read not through Western categories like freedom, equality, and independence, but through subtle, underlying Indian categories-swaraj, viraha, samvega, dharma, artha, and duhkha. Righteous Republic offers an original and subtle re-reading of a familiar field, and persuades us to view it in a different light. -- Sudipta Kaviraj, Columbia University
Ananya Vajpeyi is Fellow and Associate Professor at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, New Delhi.
Ananya Vajpeyi’s Righteous Republic: The Political Foundations of
Modern India radically advances our understanding of political
traditions in a major non-western country.
*The Guardian*
Most historians credit liberal ideas from Britain, absorbed by the
Western-oriented Indian elite, with giving birth to modern India.
(The Congress Party of Gandhi and Nehru was founded at the
suggestion of A.O. Hume, a British civil servant, in 1885.) Few are
aware of the extent to which nationalist leaders turned to Indic
texts to revive Indians’ sense of collective selfhood, and how
extensively these shaped their own political practice and the
country’s post-independence social compact.
*Wall Street Journal*
Ananya Vajpeyi’s Righteous Republic is quite simply the most
important interpretation of the evolution of India’s contemporary
nationhood since Sunil Khilnani’s The Idea of India, and a useful
antidote to the revisionist Imperialism of rising British
star-historians like Andrew Roberts and Niall Ferguson… Fluently
written, cogent in argument, studded with penetrating insights,
telling aphorisms, with complete mastery of her material,
consistently brilliant expression and exposition, this young
philosopher-historian takes her definitive place as a commentator
and synthesizer of the often varied and contradictory approaches to
the idea of India.
*Financial Express*
Ananya Vajpeyi’s Righteous Republic is a unique addition to the
discourse around the themes of India’s negotiation with its
colonial past and its present political framework… Vajpeyi excels
at what she does in the present volume, however, and the book is
informed with high standards of intellectual rigour, analytical
acuity and—last but certainly not the least—an eminently readable,
nearly jargon-free prose.
*The Hindu*
Righteous Republic makes an important contribution to the existing
literature and should be read by those who truly want to understand
more about the past and present in Indian political thought. This
carefully crafted and lucidly written book moves beyond exploring
the contemporary essence of Indian thought by looking into a vast
array of ideas on democracy, culture, religion, ethnic traditions,
nationalist aspirations and identities. It is in all a fine piece
of literary scholarship that gives readers an opportunity to engage
in sustained and in-depth exploration of a subject that has
received scant treatment by scholars.
*The Book Review*
Vajpeyi’s quest for the sources of India’s freedom struggle parts
ways with traditional historiography on the subject in ways that
renders her work unique and groundbreaking… For Vajpeyi, India’s
quest for freedom was as much a moral struggle for selfhood as for
political freedom… Righteous Republic is a riveting story of five
men’s journeys of India’s rich past through their ‘readings’ of
texts and artifacts to discover those categories that would flesh
out for them the laden ambiguities of ‘swaraj.’ Vajpeyi pulls the
reader into uncharted territory, as these five men search and then
find what they were looking for not in the dominant western
discursive categories that they hadbeen exposed to, but in a
pre-modern lexicon… Outstanding scholarship, imbued with modest
passion and effortless originality.
*Business Line*
[Vajpeyi] weaves the strands of self and sovereignty together to
argue that Indian nationalism was a moral project to create a
righteous republic distinguished by its ‘solid plinth of moral
selfhood and ethical sovereignty,’ without which India would be
just another state.
*Business Standard*
What Vajpeyi’s analysis does so admirably is to deepen our grasp of
how the category of the Indian self, which serves as the basis for
what is Indian about ‘the people,’ came to be imagined by the
makers of modern India. Just as American connotations of terms like
‘freedom’ and ‘equality’ are deeply embedded in the American
history of slavery, empire, and capitalism, Vajpeyi’s analysis
provides us with an approach for grasping the conceptual vocabulary
shaped by India’s history of colonialism and nationalism.
*Democratic World*
Ananya Vajpeyi’s Righteous Republic: The Political Foundations of
Modern India is a book that everyone interested in the evolution of
the ideas that shaped the modern Indian nation should read.
*Hindustan Times*
[Vajpeyi] reads the search for the self through five founders of
modern India: Gandhi, Nehru, Ambedkar, and the Tagores,
Rabindranath and his nephew Abanindranath… This is a book that must
be read, not just for its arguments, which are innovative, and not
just for its language, which is evocative, but for its singular
achievement in making the familiar unfamiliar, and for demanding
the asking of new questions.
*IBN Live*
Righteous Republic is compelling reading about India and its
ideological moorings in the making of, during and through the
independence movement… Righteous Republic is a book of its own
kind, written by a historian; it circumambulates multiple
disciplinary terrains: art history, cultural criticism, literary
theory, religious studies, and political and cultural history. It
also uses poetry, paintings, murals, religious texts and
archaeological finds for narrative and analysis. And yet, in
covering multiple canvasses in drawing up a complex picture,
Vajpeyi does not lose the focus of her research design. A complex
subject, dealt with in a multidisciplinary perspective, explained
with original and evocative arguments, yet written in lucid and
imaginative language, the book is essential reading not only for
professional social scientists, but also for anyone interested in
comprehending India’s ideological moorings in a fresh
perspective.
*India International Centre Quarterly*
This is a must read for those interested in India’s modern
intellectual history.
*Indian Express*
An engaging intellectual history that helps us better understand
21st-century India. Vajpeyi examines five giants involved in the
founding of the republic in 1950—Mohandas Gandhi, Rabindranath
Tagore, Abanindranath Tagore, Jawaharlal Nehru and Bhimrao
Ambedkar—who all drew inspiration from indigenous traditions as
they strove to craft a postcolonial Indian identity.
*Japan Times*
In this inspiring and ambitious work, Ananya Vajpeyi charts out an
innovative and fresh path to approach the idea of modern India, one
that especially shines because of its ingenuity and simplicity… The
project is especially unique because there has been no tradition of
thinking about the notion of the self, especially in a political
sense, in India… Vajpeyi has given us a compelling argument to
rethink the political foundations of modern India. Indeed,
Vajpeyi’s work convincingly illustrates that India’s precolonial
past matters as much as its colonial history.
*Journal of Asian Studies*
Brilliant and extremely engaging… Through a potent combination of
close literary reading and excellent sociopolitical and
methodological analysis, Vajpeyi puts forward a coherent narrative,
which is the story of the formulation of the Indian intellectual
self… [A] lucid and original argument.
*Millennium Post*
This is an important book because it takes the discourse on Indian
history beyond the realm of politics and sociology and dips into
ideas, in particular, the arts.
*Mint*
Swaraj: a word pervasive in the Indian philological lexicon,
originating from the Sanskrit swa, meaning ‘of the self,’ and
rajya—rule. The matter of deciding its true meaning from the
combination of its two root verbs should be simple and yet, as
Ananya Vajpeyi reveals in her first book on modern India’s
political foundations, it all depends on different perceptions of
national duty. Vajpeyi’s unique spin on the topic has her examining
the classical sources of inspiration behind the teachings of five
of India’s most significant founding figures: Mohandas Gandhi,
Rabindranath Tagore, his nephew Abanindranath Tagore, Jawaharlal
Nehru, and BR Ambedkar. The ‘righteous republic’ based on
self-rule, under Vajpeyi’s close study, divulges its interwoven web
mixing Sanskrit poetry, Buddhist teachings, the legacies of the
Emperor Ashoka and Mughal dynasties of the past, and even the
Bhagavad Gita, each having played a key role in shaping the
political visions of these icons. Despite confessing to the
self-perceived inadequacy of her completed work in her conclusion,
there is scarcely a fault regarding the author’s zest for the
subject, a plus point that proves effective in rousing this
reader’s own interest.
*The National*
This is a book that is original, insightful and quirky.
*Outlook*
Magisterial.
*Outlook India*
It is certainly not a book to be taken lightly. [Vajpeyi] delves
deep into India’s past to explain the ideas of these five thinkers
who had such a profound impact on the independence movement.
*Resurgence & Ecologist*
Righteous Republic creates a ground from which the moral in modern
Indian conceptions of selfhood and the founding moment of the
sovereign Republic can possibly be thought anew.
*Seminar*
Magisterial.
*Socio*
[An] extraordinarily ambitious and remarkable book… Vajpeyi’s
engagement with these seminal figures for modern Indian political
thought is scaffolded on a set of unequivocally stated foundational
claims that challenge many of the cherished principles governing
the study of South Asia in the Indian and Anglo-American academies…
Vajpeyi reads each founding father’s deeply felt engagement with
tradition, at once cerebral and visceral, through the lens of key
concepts that are, importantly, not just political but aesthetic,
ethical, moral, and spiritual… Each reading, to which a chapter is
devoted, is a masterpiece, combining careful philological and
historical work, deft close reading, and incisive political
analysis and brimming with astonishing, often counter-intuitive
insights… Provocative, brilliant, and erudite, a magnificent
reading of readings, Righteous Republic itself stands as a
foundational work of scholarship.
*Sunday Guardian*
What emerges from Righteous Republic is a sense of the intellectual
ferment in India from the turn of the 20th century up to
Independence; the sense of men, not just the five in the book,
thinking up and imagining a country, rather than just being handed
one by the British. The book is as much literary and art criticism
as it is history, requiring of Vajpeyi some agile reading. She
makes connections her five principals themselves may not have made,
particularly in her excellent chapter of Abanindranath Tagore,
making us consider afresh men and ideas to which we seem to have
become inured.
*Tehelka*
Vajpeyi is a close and interpretative reader of texts and of
paintings. She strives always to be original and writes
evocatively. Readers looking for definitive answers will be
disappointed. Vajpeyi demands that her readers join her in the
journey towards the dark cave of meaning.
*The Telegraph*
‘Swaraj,’ the key term in Indian nationalism, refers to the self.
But what is this self that is the subject of Indian self-rule?
Ananya Vajpeyi retraces the field of modern Indian political
thought to analyze the answers offered by five canonical figures.
Her work is original, acute, sensitive, frequently unconventional,
and always delightfully readable.
*Partha Chatterjee, Columbia University*
A thoroughly original, high-quality, and pathbreaking contribution
to Indian intellectual history.
*Pratap Bhanu Mehta, Centre for Policy Research*
In a series of sophisticated and original readings, Ananya Vajpeyi
paints an arresting picture of the moral imaginary inside the
tradition of modern Indian political thought. Against the grain of
much recent interpretation, Vajpeyi argues that modern Indian
political thought should be read not through Western categories
like freedom, equality, and independence, but through subtle,
underlying Indian categories—swaraj, viraha, samvega, dharma,
artha, and duhkha. Righteous Republic offers an original and subtle
re-reading of a familiar field, and persuades us to view it in a
different light.
*Sudipta Kaviraj, Columbia University*
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