Temporalization of Concepts

Temporalization of Concepts Reflections on the Concept of Unnati (Progress) in Hindi (1870–1900) MOHINDER SINGH University of Delhi

ABSTRACT

This article analyzes the historical semantics of the concept of unnati in the nationalist discourse in Hindi between 1870 and 1900. The article first outlines the basic features of the Enlightenment concept of progress using Koselleck’s analysis. It then goes on to discuss the place of the concept of progress in the colonial ideology of a “civilizing mission,” and concludes by taking up the analysis of the usage of the term unnati in the nationalist discourse in North India. KEYWORDS

contemporaneity, nation, nationalism, progress, social reform, temporalization, time

In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the word unnati was one of the most frequently used words in public discourse in Hindi. Pratāpnarāyan Miśrā, an influential Hindi writer of the North-West Provinces,1 remarked in a newspaper article: “These days wherever you go, you hear this word. In the newspapers, there is celebration of unnati, in public lectures, there is celebration of unnati, in the public assemblies, there is celebration of unnati.”2 In its usage in public discourse, the word unnati was polysemic and could be used for expressing ideas such as progress, improvement, and reform. In the late nineteenth-century nationalist discourse, unnati was used for descriptive purposes as well as for indicating a task or an imperative—the nationalist imperative of the progress and improvement of the nation. Before taking up the conceptual-historical analysis of the concept of unnati between 1870 and 1. North-West Provinces roughly coincides with the geographical boundaries of the states of Uttar Pradesh in contemporary India. This region was at the center of the Hindi movement for the official recognition of Hindi language in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. 2. “Ājkal jidhar suno yahī shabd sunaī degā: Samachār patron maim ˙ to unnati kī dhūm, vyākyānon mein unnati ki dhūm, sabhāon maim ˙ unnati kī dhūm.” in Pratāpnārāyan Miśra, Pratāpnārāyan Granthāvali, Vijayshankar Malla, ed. (New Delhi and Varanasi: Nagari Pracharini Sabha, 1992), 334.

Contributions to the History of Concepts doi:10.3167/choc.2012.070104

Volume 7, Issue 1, Summer 2012: 51–71 ISSN 1807-9326 (Print), ISSN 1874-656X (Online)

Mohinder Singh

1900, this article places the historical emergence of the imperative of unnati in the larger global context of the colonial ideology of undertaking a “civilizing mission” and progress. The central historiographical question this article addresses is: what happens when the concepts of Western political thought are transferred and translated into a non-Western nationalist context. Sudipta Kaviraj has underscored the importance of the method of conceptual history in his two essays on the concepts of freedom and public in Indian history.3 The usage of the term unnati and its significance in nationalist discourse has been discussed by Partha Chatterjee as part of his analysis of “nationalist modernity” in Bengal.4 More recently, Andrew Sartori has analyzed the concept of culture in early twentieth-century nationalist discourse in Bengal by placing it in the context of global dissemination of this concept around that time.5 The focus of this article is on temporalization of concepts, namely on how the change in the apprehension of time inflects the language of public discourse.

Temporalization of Concepts Koselleck relates the process of temporalization of social and political concepts to the larger historical processes of secularization. The historical processes of secularization led to the emergence of a new way of relating to time in this world. As the political domain is secularized, it becomes possible for human actors to think in terms of making their own history. Time, in the historical sense, is apprehended as immanent in the world in the sense that human beings begin to understand that all their tasks and challenges are solvable within historical time itself.6 The new apprehension of time, in turn, is related to the rise of the new notions of cosmos, the new frameworks of chronology and the new relationship between chronology and history. One of the basic features of the methodology of Begriffsgeschichte is the relationship Koselleck establishes between historical semantics and the his3. Sudipta Kaviraj, “Ideas of Freedom in Modern India,” in Idea of Freedom in Asia and Africa, Robert Taylor, ed. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 97–142; Sudipta Kaviraj, “Filth and the Public Sphere: Concepts and Practices about Space in Calcutta,” Public Culture 10, no. 1 (1997): 83–113. 4. Partha Chatterjee, “Our Modernity,” in Empire and Nation: Essential Writings, Nivedita Menon, ed. (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, [1994] 2010), 136–152. 5. Andrew Sartori, Bengal in Global Concept History: Culturalism in the Age of Capital (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2008). 6. Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 236–248; idem, “Temporal Foreshortening and Acceleration: A Study on Secularization,” in Religion and Politics: Cultural Perspectives, Bernhard Giesen and Daniel Suber, eds. and trans. (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 212.

52

contributions to the history of concepts

Temporalization of Concepts

torical change in the conceptions of time. Thus, he argues that the social and political vocabulary used in the public sphere during the Sattelzeit7 was also temporalized. Such temporalization of concepts can be noticed not only in concepts that directly and explicitly thematize time—concepts such as progress, history, revolution, crisis, movement, development—but also in other basic social and political concepts. Koselleck claims that the entire social and political vocabulary gets inflected in such a way that all basic concepts refer to coefficients of temporal change.8 Further, he argues that all socio-political concepts register a kind of temporal tension that occurs because people’s experiences of the past and their expectations for the future begin to drift apart.9 In other words, the new conceptual vocabulary indicates, as well as opens, new “horizons of expectations”: What is typical about these expressions is that they are not based on a predefined and common experience. Rather they compensate for a deficiency of experience by a future outline which is supposed to be realized. The basic pattern, the constitutive difference between the store of experience (Erfahrungshaushalt) and the horizon of expectation (Erwartungshorizont) in temporalization, marks all of these key-concepts (Leitbegriffe).10

Spatio-Temporal Dimensions of the Enlightenment Concept of Progress Writing on the processes of temporalization, Koselleck pays a lot of attention to two time-centered concepts: history (Geschichte) and progress. These are shown to have spatial dimensions, to the extent that both concepts played important roles in making it possible to think of history as world history. Koselleck shows that the general concept of progress was “minted” in the last decades of the eighteenth century, that is during the Enlightenment, in order to bring together experiences of progress occurring in different sectors of life throughout the previous three centuries in Europe due to events and processes such as “the Copernican revolution, the slowly developing new technology, the discovery of the globe and its people living at various levels of advancement, 7. The period referred to here is roughly between 1750 and 1850. See Koselleck, Futures Past, 236–248. 8. Koselleck, Futures Past, 248. 9. Ibid., 255–275. 10. Reinhart Koselleck, “The Temporalization of Concepts” (paper presented in Paris in 1975), Klaus Sondermann, trans., Redescriptions: Yearbook of Political Thought and Conceptual History 1 (1997): 21, http://www.jyu.fi/yhtfil/redescriptions/Yearbook%201997/ Koselleck%201997.pdf.

summer 2012

53

Mohinder Singh

and the dissolution of the society of orders through the impact of industry and capital.”11 Through his conceptual historical analysis, Koselleck shows that the Enlightenment concept of progress was instrumental in the European construction of a new, global sense of contemporaneity that had a paradoxical structure of inclusion and exclusion of the non-European parts of the world. He used the phrase “contemporaneity of noncontemporaneous” (Gleichzeitigkeit der Ungleichzeitigen) to describe this structure.12 The notion of ‘‘contemporaneity of noncontemporaneous’’ has both spatial as well as temporal dimensions as the construction of contemporaneity by the European Enlightenment was based on two kinds of comparisons: comparison across time—that is between the past and the present; and the comparison across space—that is how some parts of the world were seen as more advanced than others. Comparisons across geographical spaces also helped the Enlightenment to construct the present in Europe as the time of contemporaneity while the times in other geographical areas were rendered as the other compared to European time.13 The global sense of contemporaneity was constructed in terms of “contemporaneity of non-contemporaneous” by using a comparative framework: Comparisons promoted the emergence in experience of a world history, which was increasingly interpreted in terms of progress. A constant impulse leading to progressive comparison was drawn from the fact that individual peoples or states, parts of the earth, sciences, Stände, or classes were found to be in advance of the others. From the eighteenth century on, therefore, it was possible to formulate the postulate of acceleration; or conversely from the point of view of those left behind, the postulate of drawing level or overtaking. This fundamental experience of progress, embodied in a singular concept around 1800, is rooted in the knowledge of noncontemporaneities which exist at a chronologically uniform time. From the seventeenth century on, historical experience was increasingly ordered by the hierarchy produced through a consideration of the best existing constitution or the state of scientific, technical, or economic development.14

Koselleck also underscores the importance of the role of colonialism as a factor in the emergence of the concept of history as world history: “The contemporaneity of noncontemporaneous, initially a result of overseas expansion, became 11. Koselleck, Futures Past, 266. 12. Ibid., 236–248. 13. Koselleck, Futures Past, 236–248. See also Pheng Cheah, “Grounds of Comparison: Around the Work of Benedict Anderson,” Diacritics, 29, no. 4 (1999): 2–18; Harry Harootunian, “Some Thoughts on Comparability and Space-Time Problem,” Boundary 2: an International Journal of Literature and Culture 32, no. 2 (Summer 2005): 23–52. 14. Koselleck, Futures Past, 238.

54

contributions to the history of concepts

Temporalization of Concepts

a basic framework for the progressive construction of a world history increasingly unified since the eighteenth century.”15 This is the moment of the birth of historicism criticized by Dipesh Chakrabarty as promoting “first in Europe, then elsewhere structure of historical time.”16 More recently, the works of historians and theorists of non-European nationalisms such as Benedict Anderson, Harry Harootunian, and Manu Goswami have also placed a strong emphasis on the role of a comparative framework and the notion of “contemporaneity of noncontemporaneous” in the origins of non-Western modernities17 by emphasizing the simultaneous construction of globality and nationalism in different parts of the world. They invite us to look at the origins of the notion of noncontemporaneity from the non-Western point of view.18 Like the nationalist intellectuals of Southeast Asian countries referred to by Anderson in Spectre of Comparisons, the framework of comparison is also important for the nineteenth-century Indian nationalist intellectuals for the construction of their sense of contemporaneity. The “grounds of comparison” constructed and used in the Enlightenment concept of progress were unmistakably Eurocentric, though framed in a universalistic language.19 For the nineteenth-century Indian nationalist intellectuals, however, “nations” function as the “natural” units of comparison. The colonial condition of one nation being subjugated by another defined the world in a certain way to colonial intellectuals, which made them wonder about the reasons for that condition itself, thus making them reflective and opening their historical horizons in new ways. This reflective consciousness of the intellectuals in a colonial situation needs to be understood against the backdrop of the colonial ideology of a “civilizing mission,” which also made use of the modality of comparison in order to establish the superiority of Europe.

Progress and the “Civilizing Mission” in India The concept of progress was an important part of the self-legitimizing colonial ideology of the “civilizing mission” in India pursued aggressively from the 15. Ibid., 246. 16. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 6–11. 17. For debates on “multiple modernities,” see the special issue of Daedalus (Winter 2000). 18. Benedict Anderson, Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia, and the World (London and New York: Verso, 1998); Harootunian, “Some Thoughts on Comparability and Space-Time Problem”; Manu Goswami, “Autonomy and Comparability: Notes on the Anticolonial and the Postcolonial,” Boundary 2 32, no. 2 (Summer 2005): 201–225; Cheah, “Grounds of Comparison.” 19. Cheah, “Grounds of Comparison,” 3.

summer 2012

55

Mohinder Singh

early nineteenth century on under the intellectual leadership of paternalistic British liberals.20 As Uday Singh Mehta describes it, in the colonial situations of British India, promotion of the cause of progress and civilization of the natives involved using the framework of a pedagogy that often entailed the infantilization of the colonized.21 In other words, it was a different way of acting in history or “doing” history than what progress as a practical task meant in Europe: The project of the empire is inscribed in the judgments of that way of “doing” history, which relentlessly attempts to align or educate the regnant forms of the unfamiliar with its own expectations. Liberal imperialism is impossible without this epistemological commitment—which by the nineteenth century supports both the paternalism and progressivism—that is, the main theoretical justification of the empire.22

Thus, colonialism embroiled the European project of civilization and progress in deep contradictions, as “progress from above” is a conceptually inconsistent practice. The Enlightenment concept of progress assumed rational autonomy, individuality and freedom in civil society, and self-government at the level of the state—things that the colonial regime by its nature could not allow.23 In British India, the idea of a “civilizing mission” included two kinds of progress: material and moral. Material progress included the introduction of new technologies, campaigns for public health, and economic progress; and the moral progress was understood in terms of promotion of education, character building, and the fight against social evils, which also involved social reform legislations.24 The colonial discourse of civilization and progress itself must be understood against the backdrop of the institutions and practices of power introduced by the colonial state. In many areas of life, the colonial regime caused deep ruptures through its interventions. It introduced a new set of legal and administrative institutions and practices that significantly affected the existing conceptions of time and space and made the world appear to them in ways 20. Michael Mann, “‘Torchbearers upon the Path of Progress’: British Ideology of Moral and Material Progress in India,” in Colonialism as Civilizing Mission: Cultural Ideology in British India, Harald Fischer-Tiné and Michael Mann, eds. (London: Anthem Press, 2004); Uday Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century Liberal Political Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 1–45. 21. Mehta, Liberalism and Empire, 30–35. 22. Ibid., 20. 23. Gyan Prakash, Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999). 24. Mann, “Torchbearers upon the Path of Progress.”

56

contributions to the history of concepts

Temporalization of Concepts

deeply unfamiliar. Manu Goswami has argued that during the late nineteenth century, the colonial state created new forms of “social, economic and territorial closure,” accomplished by means of a whole host of practices, such as: the constitution and regulation of a centralized monetary system; the institution of territorially uniform and standard taxation, tariff and custom policies; the institution of a massive infra-structural web of railways and communication technologies; the classification and hierarchical ordering of administrative-territorial units; the development of census and survey agencies that systematically surveyed, mapped and measured both land and people; the production of built environments and architectural forms that made visible the presence of the colonial state; and complex bureaucracies oriented towards the collection and assessment of land revenue.25

The spatial-territorial closure also became possible because of the establishment of a single centralized authority, which in turn provided basic conditions of administrative, legal, and economic unification of the country. These measures helped in the integration of British India as a part of the world capitalist economy while also making India a separate entity that could be compared with other such entities in terms of economic progress.26 The genealogy of the concept of Indian economy is also related to the historical emergence of the domain of a national economy that could be compared with other similar national economies in precise quantitative terms with the help of new kinds of facts created by certain institutional practices of the colonial state. These facts referred to the large-scale generation of data and numbers based on new, economic categories like wealth, population, employment, growth, numbers of poor and rich, national income, distribution of goods, patterns of consumption, and so on. These measures were accompanied by new modes of representations of facts.27 These very statistics and data were later used by the nationalists to contest the colonial claims of India’s improvement and progress in economic terms. All these changes created the conditions for the possibility of thinking of, measuring, and comparing progress in concrete terms with quantitative indicators and units. It is important to mention these factors as they provide us with the necessary conditions of possibility for the emergence of the idea of national progress (deś kī unnati) in nineteenth-century India. 25. Manu Goswami, “From Swadeshi to Swaraj: Nation, Economy, Territory in Colonial South Asia, 1870 to 1907,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 40, no. 4 (October 1998): 612. 26. Ibid., 611–614. 27. U. Kalpagam, “Temporalities, History and Routines of Rule in Colonial India,” Time and Society 8, no. 1 (1999): 141–159; Goswami “From Swadeshi to Swaraj,” 610–611.

summer 2012

57

Mohinder Singh

The Concept of Unnati in Hindi Unnati and Contemporaneity The progress of the nation (deś kī unnati) became a central theme of the nationalist discourse in Hindi from the very moment of its inauguration in the 1870s under the intellectual leadership of Bhārtendu Hariśchandra. Bhārtendu Hariśchandra, who was a prominent nationalist intellectual from Banāras, also known as the father of modern Hindi. He was actively involved in the movement for the official recognition of Hindi language with Devanāgarī script that took off during the 1860s and 1870s. Hariśchandra’s ideas had a deep influence on the literary and political discourse in Hindi during the last decades of the nineteenth century.28 Many of the prominent literary figures and influential journalists of this period, who were active in politics also, enthusiastically promoted his ideas. Hariśchandra and his contemporary intellectuals—including Bālkr≥s≥n≥a Bhatt≥ ≥ and Pratāpnarāyan Miśrā—played a historical role in the shaping of modern Hindi literary, as well as political, discourse in this region. Their historical role acquires an added importance as they were also instrumental in developing the language or idiom of modern politics in this region because they had a wide readership among the newly educated. Thus, in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the linguistic and political discourses in this region were intertwined. From the outset, the concern for progress in the nationalist discourse was accompanied by a concern for the position of the nation in comparison with other nations, particularly the nations of the West. In the essays, literary works, and speeches of Hariśchandra and other Hindi public intellectuals of the nineteenth century, contemporaneity is referred to with frequently used phrases such as vartamān kāl (present time), yeh samay (this time), hamārā samay (our time), mahāghor kāl or vikrāl-kāl (terrible time). In this discourse, “the present” acquires a quality of transition, as one article by Hariśchandra, published in 1872, puts it: The state of transition in India, after a lapse of so many centuries of thralldom, is come under the sway of the British nation. The country is gradually rising from the death-like slumber of misrule and oppression by the appearance of the western rays of civilization and enlightenment, and with its bulk of multifarious population, is influenced by the progressive policy of the British nation.29 28. For a detailed study of the life and works of Bhārtendu Hariśchandra, see Vasudha Dalmia, The Nationalization of Hindu Tradition: Bhartendu Hariśchandra and the Nineteenth Century Banaras (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997). 29. Bhārtendu Hariśchandra, Bhārtendu Hariśchandra Granthāvalī, Vol. 6, Omprakash Singh, ed. (New Delhi: Prakashan Sansthan, 2010), 361 (written originally in English).

58

contributions to the history of concepts

Temporalization of Concepts

Hariśchandra goes on to described his own time as “progressive,” a situation that nevertheless required commitment and action on the part of the inhabitants of the nation for “national improvement” to be possible. So “the present” (vartaman) here was understood in descriptive terms as a time that had broken with the past in important ways, but was also understood as a moment of opportunity that required action. The public speech delivered by Hariśchandra in 1884 in Balia, “Bhāratvars≥ kī unnati kaise ho saktī hai” (How can India progress) is an important text for understanding the precise usage of the concept of unnati in nationalist discourse. In this speech, Hariśchandra uses the term unnati to describe the situation and prescribe tasks at various levels—from global, via national and regional, to family and individual levels. But instead of unnati appearing as the progress of humanity or a belief in the advancement of human reason, it is defined as a “horserace” of progress. He described his view of the global situation in 1884 as follows: This time is such that it seems as if a horserace of progress is going on. The American, the English, the French, Turkish, etc. (horses of different breeds), all, are running in this race. Each one of them has the wish to be the first to touch the finishing line. … This time is such that whoever lags behind now will never be able to move ahead, even if millions of efforts are made later on.30

As noted earlier, “the present” is also understood by Hariśchandra as a moment of opportunity. The benevolent presence of British rule brought “rays of civilization and enlightenment to India” and established the conditions of peace and order that are conducive to putting the nation on the path of progress. But the British rulers could not accomplish the task of progress in India because the British did not have the time to think of the well-being of “us poor, dirty, dark (colored) people” (ġarīb, gande, kāle ādmī).31 An important distinction is made here: while British rule provided the conditions and opportunity for progress of the nation, the task would have to be carried out by the Indians themselves. The old ruling classes (the princes and kings) and the old socioreligious authorities (the Brahmins) were not showing any signs of taking this task seriously. It would have to be the responsibility of the people themselves. Hariśchandra addressed the audience directly: “you yourselves, give up your laziness and get ready for the task.”32 Again, through the modality of compari30. Ibid., 67. Original text: “Yeh samay aisā hai ki unnati kī māno ghur≥dor≥ ho rahī hai. American, Angrez, Fransīs ādi turakĩ tāzī sab sarpatt dor≥e jā≥te hain. Sab ke jī maim ˙ yahi hai ki pa˙la˙ hamin pehle chhū laim ˙ . … Yeh samay aisā hai ki jo pīchhe rah jaegā phir koti upāy kiye bhī āge na badh sakegā.” 31. Ibid., 66. 32. “Tum āp hī kamar kaso, ālas chor≥o” (ibid., 68).

summer 2012

59

Mohinder Singh

son, he tried to show how in England everyone, including the farmer and the coachmen, took a deep interest in public affairs and read newspapers whenever they found time. He thus outlined and imagined a public sphere of nationalist politics wherein every member of the nation is visualized as taking an active interest in the issues related to national improvement and progress. In this speech, as elsewhere, economic issues were already emerging as central to the question of national progress. He refers to the poverty of the nation along with the census report (mardumśumarī), specifically the increasing population and its unfavorable proportion to the decreasing wealth of the nation.33 In order to give evidence for progress in the country, comparisons are often made across time. This sort of comparison can be found in another article by Hariśchandra, “Scope for the Educated Indians” (1873): One who had visited India some half a century ago, is to come again here [sic]; he will, no doubt, be startled to find the outward pomp and flourish of British boasted civilization, and will be astonished to see the grand operation of the “East India Railway Company” from Howrah to Delhi terminus with carriages, employes & c. [sic] Which do not fall short in comparison with that of England’s. Further at the outset, he will be delighted to find natives swell in bears and benches [sic] with sufficient legal acumen that puts many ordinary Englishmen into blush, and will be surprised to find them serving as Clerks and Heads of departments with all official formalism that does credit to the nation. He will again see the progress of education good and glaring, many Colleges and Schools will show ample examples of refined understanding and good culture. He will see the facility of communication by Post and Telegram as easy as in other countries of Europe, and last of all, he will see, with unfeigned pleasure his Brittannia’s [sic] numerous merchants pushing trade and commerce with redoubled zeal, and energy by establishing extensive factories throughout the length and breadth of India.34

In order to find signs of progress, the nationalist intellectuals frequently resort to comparing the present to the recent past. But such descriptions are often accompanied by an element of irony, in the sense that they end up pointing out the gap between the appearance (“outward pomp”) of progress and the actual situation under colonial rule. Indeed, further on in the text, Hariśchandra writes: “But alas! he is quite ignorant of the true status of the educated Indians.”35 Bālkr≥s≥n≥a Bhat≥t ≥, the editor of Hindi Pradīp, an important news journal and an influential nationalist intellectual of this period, in an essay titled “Mulk kī 33. Ibid., 68–69. 34. Bhārtendu Hariśchandra, “Scope for the Educated Indians,” Haris Chandra Magazine (November 1873): 44 (written originally in English). 35. Ibid.

60

contributions to the history of concepts

Temporalization of Concepts

taraqqī kyā chīz hai”36 (What is the progress of the nation [1880]) gave a similar description of national progress under colonialism. He set out by comparing the situations in 1860 and 1880 and wrote about signs of progress in various fields. He mentioned the general speeding up of life, in part due to roadways and railways; the general improvement in the availability of various commodities, which had been scarce or not readily available before; the improvement in the quality of commodities; the emergence of the feeling of nationalism due to the spread of the literacy and of newspapers; the general consensus among the different sectors of society regarding the desirability of national progress, despite the prevalence of all kinds of divisions in society. All these were taken as crucial signs of progress. The essay, however, ended with an ironic twist, saying that all this progress took place under the rule of the British and the British were the receivers of the real benefits (sacchā fāyda).37 The task of unnati of the nation required, then, that the imperative of unnati was taken to various other levels. At these levels the unnati of the nation was linked to the other sense of unnati—unnati as improvement and reform, in the social and moral sense. In his 1884 speech “How can India progress,” Hariśchandra used the term unnati in both these senses: a sense of reform and improvement, on the one hand, and of material progress, on the other.38 In the sense of reform, in other words, using unnati in a more critical-reflective sense, Hariśchandra exhorted that unnati had to be carried out in every field of activity.39 The list of things to be subjected to unnati and reform (sudhār) was given thus: dharma/religion; domestic and outside matters; employment, civility, and conduct; bodily strength and mental strength; society/community (samāj); child, adult, and the old; women and men; the poor; every condition of India; every caste and community (sab jāti). In other words, every aspect of national life was to be subjected to the task of unnati.40 Thus, as Vasudha Dalmia has argued in her book on Hariśchandra, the question of social reform was to be subsumed under the larger imperative of progress.41

36. Taraqqi, an Urdu word, also means progress. It was often used in Hindi during this period interchangeably with unnati. 37. Bhatt≥ ,≥ Bālkr≥s≥n,≥ Pratinidhi Sankalan, Satyaprakash Miśra, ed. (New Delhi: National Book Trust, 1996), 13–14. 38. Vasudha Dalmia, The Nationalization of Hindu Tradition: Bhartendu Hariśchandra and the Nineteenth Century Banaras (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999), 21. See also Namvar Singh, “Bhārtendu aur Bhārat ki Unnati,” in Hindī kā Gadyaparva, Ashish Tripathi, ed (New Delhi: Rajkamal Prakashan, 2010), 100. 39. Hariśchandra, Bhārtendu Hariśchandra Granthāvalī, Vol. 6, 69. 40. Ibid. 41. Vasudha Dalmia, The Nationalization of Hindu Tradition, 25.

summer 2012

61

Mohinder Singh

Unnati, Nation, and the Figure of One’s Own Language Hariśchandra’s speech on the progress of India ends with self-reliance, which was also one of the main agendas of fast emerging economic nationalism in India. As mentioned earlier, the political discourse in this region during this period was intertwined with the discourse of the official recognition of Hindi language. An important recurring motif of this discourse was the progress of “one’s own” language (nij bhās≥a). Interestingly, Hariśchandra’s speech ends with this line: “Work for the progress of your nation, in your own language.”42 Hariśchandra strongly emphasized the importance of the progress of one’s own language for national progress and he understood the progress of Hindi language as an instrument for and a vehicle of national progress (unnati). One of the important roles of one’s own language as a vehicle of progress was as the carrier of new kind of knowledge that the West had made available and which was thought to be indispensable for the progress of the nation. In 1877 in Allahabad, on the occasion of the founding of Hindi Vardhini Sabha (Society for the Advancement of Hindi), Hariśchandra gave a speech, which was published under the title “Hindī kī unnati par vyākhyān” (Discourse on the Progress of Hindi).43 Here, Hariśchandra gave a series of justifications for linking the progress of the nation with progress in language. He said that the progress of one’s own language was important for the transmission of sciences and knowledge among common people. Moreover, the progress of the mother tongue was important for linking home and the domain of family to the outside world. The improvement (unnati) of the family was understood to be indispensable for the overall progress of the nation.44 The language of communication among family members can only be one’s own native language. Therefore, the progress of nij bhās≥ā was important for the education of all family members. Hariśchandra also emphasized that education for both parents was vital, as they were both responsible for raising and educating the children.45 Family as an institution had become the focus of reform and improvement in the social reform discourse in the nineteenth century, wherein the education of women was one of the central agendas.46 The imperative of national progress was required to reach the family but as long as the two are conducted in different languages there was a chasm between the home and the outside world. The role of the vernacular 42. “Apne deś maim˙, apnī bhās≥ā maim ˙ unnati karō,” Hariśchandra, Bhārtendu Hariśchandra Granthāvalī, Vol. 6, 71. 43. Ibid., Vol. 4, 377. 44. Ibid., “Unnati pūri hai tabahĩ jab ghar unnati hoi…” 45. Ibid., 377–378. 46. See Sumit Sarkar and Tanika Sarkar, eds., Women and Social Reform in India: A Reader (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008).

62

contributions to the history of concepts

Temporalization of Concepts

languages was to provide the bridge between the public world of knowledge and politics and private world of family.47 Yet the difference between men and women in terms of education was maintained. The women were supposed to make a shift to the new standardized vernaculars, the learning of English was restricted to men. Further, and more important in the context of this article, Hariśchandra asked his audience to compare the situation of the British and how they had turned the English language into a vehicle to import all kinds of ideas and knowledge from around the world through translation.48 It was because of this, Hariśchandra argued, that the British had made so much progress (unnati) and were ahead of every other nation. Finally, comparison with the British led to the reflection on the poor condition of India in every respect. Different things could be learned from the literary, philosophical and scientific treasures of Persian, Sanskrit, and English, but “we” were poor as long as “our own” language was lagging behind in such fields as arts, science, and civility. There was a great need to be educated in contemporary science and technology: railways, machines, civil engineering, photography, and so on. These were the crucial differences between the two nations and in these differences lay the reason why: “they” were rulers and “we” were subjects (hum ġulām ye bhūp).49 Concluding his speech, Hariśchandra exhorted the audience to work toward the progress of the Hindi language through reading, writing, printing, and publishing, heavily emphasizing the task of translation (anuvād) from other languages. What was needed, he said, was the translation of important contemporary branches of knowledge: science, technology, law, politics, and so on. Without this necessary work of translation, India would continue to be dependent on foreigners and progress would not be achieved. Through the work of translation, it would be possible to plunder the treasures of knowledge in Sanskrit, Arabic, Persian, and English. He exhorts his audience to translate, summarize, and write new books in one’s own language. But his basic reason for emphasizing the learning of contemporary sciences was the nature of the present time (vartamān kāl): defining the character of the present time and defining the place “we” had in the world, compared to others.50 Thus Hariśchandra not only provided a clear connection between the progress of the nation and one’s own language by emphasizing the importance of translation of various sorts of knowledge necessary for such a progress; he was also, as Vasudha Dalmia has argued, trying to create in practice “the language in the mould of English.”51 Just as the figure of the West is invoked in 47. Cf. Dalmia, The Nationalization of Hindu Tradition, 202–203. 48. Hariśchandra, Bhārtendu Hariśchandra Granthāvalī, Vol. 4, 379. 49. Ibid., 380. 50. Ibid., 382. 51. Dalmia, The Nationalization of Hindu Tradition, 206–207.

summer 2012

63

Mohinder Singh

a comparative framework for the practical task of imagining the nation and working toward its progress, the imaginary figure of the foreign language (English) is invoked for the practical task of standardizing and homogenizing one’s own language (Hindi).52 As the Japanese historian Naoki Sakai has argued, in the case of non-Western nationalisms, one discovers a homology between these two sorts of invocations. Sakai has termed this phenomenon “the schema of co-figuration.”53 He writes: By the schema of co-figuration, I want to point out the essentially “imaginary” nature of the comparative framework of Japan and the West, since the figure in co-figuration is imaginary in the sense that it is a sensible image on the one hand, and practical in its ability to evoke one to act toward the future on the other. Thus, the figure invokes imagination by which desire for identity is produced, and is the central issue for the logic of imagination.54

Writing about the relationship between the figure of foreign language and one’s own language, Sakai again uses the notion of the “schema of co-figuration.”55 Thus, the imaginary figures of the West and a foreign language work as twin partners of the imagined figures of the nation and one’s own language. The latter two are, however, the objects of concrete practical tasks for the nationalists. Hariśchandra’s discourse of unnati can be understood as delineating such a practical task. Strategic Uses of the Concept of Unnati In this section, the usage of the term unnati is studied by placing it in the context of another discourse, one of the central themes of public discourse in the second half of the nineteenth century: that of social reformism in the 52. The invocation of the figure of one’s own language by Hariśchandra should be seen in the historical context of the change in the role of language in India in the nineteenth century. It changed from being one of the possible media of communication people used to being a marker of political identity. In other words, the role of language changed in such a way that now political communities could be organized around a language. In India, this shift in the role of language was later expressed in the understanding of language in terms of the category of mother tongue (mātr≥ bhās≥a). See “Writing, Speaking, Being: Language and the Historical Formation of Identities in India,” in Asha Sarangi, ed., Language and Politics in India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009), 328–335; Lisa Mitchell, Language, Emotion, and Politics in South India: Making of a Mother Tongue (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), 35–67. 53. Naoki Sakai, Translation and Subjectivity: On Japan and Cultural Nationalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 51–63. 54. Ibid., 52. 55. Ibid., 59.

64

contributions to the history of concepts

Temporalization of Concepts

nineteenth-century India. The most influential social reform movement in the North Indian regions was the Ārya Samāj movement founded by Swami Dayanand Saraswati in 1875. The Ārya Samāj carried out a trenchant critique of the popular Hindu religious practices such as idol worship, promoted monotheism, and provided a challenge to the traditional authority of the Brahmins in the performance of rituals. It also criticized many existing social customs among the Hindus and promoted a radical social reform agenda.56 The educated Hindu elite of this region stood up against the Ārya Samāj movement, in defense of what they understood to be orthodox Hinduism, naming it Sanātana Dharma (eternal religion or eternal law).57 Bhārtendu Hariśchandra was connected to one such conservative organization, the Kāshi Dharma Sabhā, which was created to counter the challenge posed by the religious and social reform movements in general and the influence of Ārya Samāj in particular.58 The influential Hindi public intellectuals and the followers of Hariśchandra like Pratāpnārāyan Miśra, Rādhāchanran Goswāmī, Bālkr≥s≥n≥ Bhatt≥ ,≥ and Badrinārāyān Chaudhry Upādhyāy “Prēmghan” were hostile, to different degrees, toward the reformism of the Ārya Samāj from the very beginning of this the movement in the 1870s.59 At the same time, this group of intellectuals—collectively known as Bhārtendu Mandal writers60—was not a defender of the social status quo among the Hindus. They criticized certain social customs and practices among the Hindus. They also supported some of the reform agendas promoted by the social reform organizations, such as those related to child marriage, widow remarriage, and women’s education. Yet their arguments for supporting such agendas were very different from the organizations committed to more comprehensive social reform such as Ārya Samāj, which related the social reform they promoted to the question of religious reform and grounded them both in reworked theology of Hinduism as outlined in Dayānand Saraswati’s Satyārth Prakāś. 56. For information on Ārya Samāj, see J. T. F. Jordens, Dayanand Saraswati: His Life and Ideas (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1978); Kenneth W. Jones, Arya Dharma: Hindu Consciousness in the 19th Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989). 57. Zavos argues that the term sanātana dharma became a signifier of Hindu orthodoxy toward the end of the nineteenth century. See John Zavos, “Defending Hindu Tradition: Sanatana Dharma as a Symbol of Orthodoxy in Colonial India,” Religion 31, no. 2 (2001): 109–123. 58. Dalmia, The Nationalization of Hindu Tradition, 35. 59. Premghan called the social reform organizations including the Ārya Samāj “halfenemies” (adhe shatru). Prēmghan, Prēmghan Sarvasva, Vol. II, Prabhakareshvar Prasad and Dinesh Narayan Upadhyaya, ed. (Prayag: Hindi Sahitya Sammelan, 1950), 212. 60. Self-proclaimed followers of Bhārtendu Harishchandra, these writers were collectively known as Bhārtendu Mandal (Bhārtendu Group) writers.

summer 2012

65

Mohinder Singh

The Bhārtendu Mandal intellectuals promoted a limited social reform agenda, separating it from the question of religious reform. Hariśchandra explicitly argued in favor of a separation of religious code (dharmanĩti) and social code (samājnīti), separating the question of what, as an essence or core of religion, is handed down from tradition and what were mere accretions. Some of the social customs were considered changeable, in Hariśchandra’s argument, according to considerations of “time and place” (deśakāla).61 This line of argument was later followed by the Bhārtendu Mandal intellectuals, but they tended to be far more conservative in their approach to questions of social reform than Hariśchandra, while their defense of sanātan dharma, traditional Hinduism, gradually became stronger. This is particularly true with regard to Pratāpnārāyan Miśra and Premghan, both of whom enthusiastically supported the programs and activities of the Bhārat Dharma Mahāmandal.62 In the last two decades of the nineteenth century, the political scenario was changing fast as the conservative reaction against social reform movements grew much stronger and more organized in different parts of India. Moreover, with the formation of the Indian National Congress in 1885, a strong argument began to take shape in the domain of nationalist politics—the argument for the exclusion of social reform issues from the strictly political agendas of the Congress. Intellectuals like Miśra and Premghan became firm supporters of this exclusion. Their position on this issue found expression in their reactions to the Age of Consent Bill controversy (1891),63 in which they joined the growing chorus of protest against the bill, which decried the colonial interference in the socio-religious affairs of the Hindus. It was indeed the question of interference by the government that was seen as one of the main problems with the bill. Some of the opponents of the bill argued in favor of social reform, 61. Hariśchandra, Bhārtendu Hariśchandra Granthāvalī, Vol. 6, 70; see also. Dalmia, The Nationalization of Hindu Tradition, 24–25. 62. Founded in 1887, the Bhārat Dharma Mahāmandal was an umbrella organization of conservative, sanātan dharma-defending organizations. See Zavos, “Defending Hindu Tradition,” 115; and Miśra, “Śrī Bhārat Dharma Mahāmandal” in Pratāpnārāyan Granthāvali ([1890] 1992), 273–279; Prēmghan, Premghan Sarvasva, Vol. II, Prabhakareshvar Prasad and Dinesh Narayan Upadhyaya ed. (Prayag: Hindi Sahitya Sammelan, 1950), 230–231. 63. Miśra, Pratāpnārāyan Granthāvali, 284–286; The Age of Consent Act, 1891, was a piece of legislation enacted by the colonial government in March 1891, introduced as a bill in January of that year. This act raised the age of consummation of marriage from ten to twelve years old. There was massive opposition as soon as the bill was introduced in the legislative council. The opposition to this reformist measure of the government came mainly from the conservative opponents of the social reform movements. For the historical analyses of this controversy, see Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The Manly Englishman and the Effeminate Bengali (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995); Tanika Sarkar, “A Prehistory of Rights: The Age of Consent Debate in Colonial Bengal,” Feminist Studies 26, no. 3 (2000), 601–622.

66

contributions to the history of concepts

Temporalization of Concepts

particularly with regard to family-related “private” matters being exclusively the affairs of religious communities, in which the colonial government had no right to interfere. In fact, they often accused the social reform organizations of having some kind of nexus with the government.64 This group of intellectuals also often accused the social reform organizations of creating internal sectarian divisions (matmatāntar ke jhagde) among the Hindus. This recurring critique of sectarian divisions and the concomitant emphasis on unity was started by Hariśchandra and continued by his followers, like Miśra and Rādhācharan Goswami.65 It was perfectly consistent with the proposed exclusion of the social reform agendas from the political agendas of the early Indian National Congress. In 1890, Pratāpnārāyan Miśra wrote that the tasks related to social reform (sāmājik sudhār) should be left to the Brahmans and the Maulvis, and should not be made a political issue as they could be divisive, whereas the political question could unite all the different communities.66 This argument should be seen in connection with the related argument against the intervention of the colonial state into the affairs of the community (samāj). This strategy helped the upper caste elite to substantially preserve the upper caste dominated patriarchal order even though the order itself was to be adjusted to the demands of national progress (deśonnati), under the leadership of the Western-educated, but conservative, leadership. In this national political context of the last two decades of the nineteenth century, the meaning of unnati too became highly contested. Pratapnarayan Miśra, for instance, often used the term unnati in ways that rhetorically underplayed the importance of the social reform questions and emphasized unity of the nation (deś/jāti) and the religious community (Hindu jāti).67 Miśra’s essay from this period, “Deśonnati” (Progress of the nation), brings together all these issues under the common motif of unnati. In this essay, he wrote about the dispute over the meaning of the term in the public sphere. Different criteria, according to him, were being used for unnati of the nation by different groups and parties who defined the term: some emphasized wealth, some social reform, some knowledge and science, and some education. Inter64. Miśra, Pratāpnārāyan Granthāvali, 284–286; “Premghan” Premghan Sarvasva, Vol. II, Prabhakareshvar Prasad and Dinesh Narayan Upadhyaya ed. (Prayag: Hindi Sahitya Sammelan) ([1895] 1950), 224. 65. Hariśchandra, Bhārtendu Hariśchandra Granthāvalĩ, Vol. 6, 71; Vol. 5, 287–288. 66. Miśra, Pratāpnārāyan Granthāvali, 223–225. 67. During this period, the term jāti has multiple meanings. It could mean nation, community, caste, species. The term deś, while also meaning nation, had a territorial dimension in its meaning. As a matter of historical fact, in the nationalist rhetoric of the Hindu intellectuals of this period, there was an overlap between the two references of the term jāti: nation and religious community. In fact, when the phrase “Hindu jāti” is used it refers to community as well as the nation. Only in the first decades of the twentieth century, a clear distinction begins to be made between the two.

summer 2012

67

Mohinder Singh

estingly, he put an emphasis on love (prēm) as an essential condition for the unnati of the nation arguing that: “Without love, nobody has made progress anywhere, neither are they likely to do so in present or future.”68 The Hindu varn≥a based social stratification is justified and explained in this essay as working basically through love and cooperation between social groups divided by the differential nature of their respective caste professions.69 This rhetoric of love is soon turned against the social reformers. Since, in Miśra’s view, by calling for social-religious reform, the reformers propagated sectarianism and sowed the seeds of disunity among the Hindus, they were creating obstacles for the unnati of the nation. He criticized the Ārya Samāj for creating animosity against some groups of society, particularly the Brahmins, through their harsh criticism of some of the Hindu religious rituals and practices.70 Miśra’s rhetoric against “sectarianism” is not an isolated case of a sudden outburst; it appears in this discourse with regularity, along with the rhetoric of unity (ekā). Sometimes the unity meant unity of the nation (deś/jāti), often it also meant the unity of the religious community. Hariśchandra had also advised the Hindus against sectarianism and had underscored the importance of love (prēm) and unity. In another important essay from the same year “Vais≥n≥avatā aur Bhāratvars≥” (Vaishnavism and India), Hariśchandra pointed out the dangers of the lack of unity and solidarity among the Hindus caused by prevailing sectarianism among them. He wrote about the importance of unity among the Hindus arguing that they needed to be united in order to be able to compete with other communities like Christians and Muslims for jobs, education, and economic prosperity.71 As long as they were not united, he argued, the Hindus would not be able to achieve prosperity. It is clear from the whole discourse of unnati during this period that however contested this term might have been in the public sphere in terms of its sense, its evaluation was positive. In other words, unnati was considered something desirable and good in itself. By strategically defining unnati in terms of love and unity, Miśra sought to appropriate this concept to divert the attention from the critique of the Hindu social order. In this way, Miśra could only achieve a temporary deferment of the caste question from becoming an important agenda of nationalist discourse in this region.72 68. Miśra, Pratāpnārāyan Granthāvali, 20; Original text: “Prem ke binā kabhĩ, kahĩn, kisĩ prakār, kisĩ kĩ unnati na hui hai, na hogi, na hotĩ hai.” 69. Ibid., 21. 70. Ibid., 22. 71. Hariśchandra, Bhārtendu Hariśchandra Granthāvalī, Vol. 5, 287–288. 72. As Francesca Orsini has shown, in the first decades of the twentieth century, strong critiques of the Hindu caste system emerged in the Hindi public sphere that disturbed the upper caste intellectuals’ vision of solidarity and unity within Hindu society. See Francesca Orsini, Hindi Public Sphere (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002), 225–239.

68

contributions to the history of concepts

Temporalization of Concepts

Unnati and the Temporalization of Concepts How does the concept of unnati work vis-à-vis the basic problematic of nationalist thought in India as it is beginning to emerge in the last quarter of the nineteenth century? The concept of unnati made its appearance as an important concept in Indian public discourse against the background of high colonial rhetoric of the “moral and material progress” of the “natives” as part of its “civilizing mission.” In the process of its translation into a colonial context, the original concept of progress—grounded in the assumption of the progress of human reason in history—lost some of its meaning, as the colonial project, from the outset, was embroiled in contradictions. The contradictions of the colonial project were glaring as it tried to combine progress, enlightenment, and civilization with tutelage and denial of agency to the subject of improvement.73 The concept of progress was one of those concepts, which, in the nineteenth century, the Western-educated Indian elite “sought to make their own” in a way that agency could be claimed for the nation also.74 Thus, the nationalist intellectuals thought of progress of the nation in terms of “our own” progress—translated in Hindi variously as Deśonnati, deś ki unnati, or mulk ki taraqqi. This means that rather than a simple top-down transfer between colonizer and colonized, conceptual translation and adoption should be understood as a multi-layered and complex inner process, involving different Indian languages. The concept of unnati should be understood as part of a new conceptual vocabulary of a political language consisting of a whole set of new concepts like history (itihās), community/society (samāj), religion (dharma), thisworldly (ihlaukik), community/nation (jāti), nation/country (deś), civilization (sabhyatā), nationalism ( jatiyatā and qaumiyat), politics (rājnīti), freedom (mukti and swādheenatā). This conceptual terminology should be understood in the light of the new perspective on time that opens up during this period with the emergence of the new discourse of history.75 Temporalization of political concepts—which is part of the larger processes of secularization—is a result of the notion of time itself becoming secularized. As mentioned earlier in the article, temporalization involves an apprehension of time in secular terms, thus making possible the belief in human beings’ control over their history. The conceptual framework of nationalist thought that emerged in 73. Gyan Prakash, “Civil Society, Community, and the Nation,” Etnográfica 6, no. 1 (2002): 27–39; see also Prakash, Another Reason, 3–14; Mehta, Liberalism and Empire, 30–35. 74. Prakash, Another Reason, 3–14. 75. For the advent of the new historical thinking in the wake of colonialism in India, see Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 76–115, and Vinay Lal, The History of History: Politics and Scholarship in Modern India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003), 27–78.

summer 2012

69

Mohinder Singh

nineteenth-century India is intimately related to the new conceptions of time and history. Temporalization of concepts also determines the semantic mutations of the key concepts of the emerging political language and of the terms appropriated from the past such as unnati, but also dharma, samaj (community/society), and jati (community, nation). In the nationalist discourse, these concepts remain highly general and ambiguous in meaning, thus being contested by different social and political organizations, parties, and groups. In due course, new concepts were added to the nationalist political discourse, while the existing ones were deeply contested and some of them underwent semantic mutations. The term unnati itself was much more important for the political discourse of the nineteenth century than of the twentieth. The nineteenthcentury nationalist intellectuals took this term from Sanskrit. In Sanskrit, the term unnati meant rising, ascending, swelling up, elevation, height, increase, advancement, and prosperity.76 It can be noted here that in comparison with the concept of progress—indicating a distinct movement forward in historical terms—this sense is missing among the various meanings of the Sanskrit word unnati. But as the eminent Hindi literary critic Namvar Singh has noted, the nineteenth-century appropriators of this term used it to express both the concepts of reform and improvement as well as the concept of progress, indicating a movement forward in secular time.77 In the early decades of the twentieth century, the term pragati was used in Hindi for translating the concept of progress, as it was probably considered more appropriate. Although pragati is not a Sanskrit word, it derives from a Sanskrit word pragat, which means “gone forward.”78 Thus pragati is closer in meaning to the Western concept of progress as it was also more universalistic in its reference. The twentieth-century use of pragati could be more universalistic in its reference as with the advent of the discourse of internationalism and cosmopolitanism and the ideology of socialism, the narrow nationalist frames of thinking could be overcome. To conclude, what is interesting about the concept of unnati is that it performs the important function of bringing together the multiple tasks of specific improvements in different sectors under the overall imperative of the progress of the nation. In this concept, the concerns of the different domains of national life like the social, the economic, the religious, the scientific, and the political were unified and related to the imperative of national progress. Thus unnati could refer to the imperative of the regeneration of the social life through reformist measures as well as to the material (scientific and economic) progress 76. Monier Williams, A Sanskrit-English Dictionary: Etymologically and Philosophically Arranged (New Delhi: Motilal Banarasidass, [1899] 1988). 77. Namvar Singh, “Bhārtendu aur Bhārat ki Unnati,” in Hindī kā Gadyaparva, Ashish Tripathi, ed. (New Delhi: Rajkamal Prakashan 2010), 100. 78. Monier Williams, op. cit.

70

contributions to the history of concepts

Temporalization of Concepts

of the nation measured in terms of international comparison and competition with other nations. This is true about both the reformists and their opponents, the conservative intellectuals. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, both parties were concerned about the regeneration of the social life as well as the material progress of the nation, with each party’s, however, emphasizing different aspects of unnati.

summer 2012

71