argument, better than that of an inauthentic minority that would exploit
its own ignorant people (which, naturally, the imperialist power would be
too civilised to do).
While attempting to refute these arguments, nationalists themselves
took the charge of inauthenticity more than a little seriously; and India
was no exception. Acutely aware of being incorporated into a world view
that saw progress as a product, or at least a by-product, of imperialism,
they sought to assess what aspects of so-called ‘Western’ progress they
might profitably appropriate without losing the ‘authentic genius’ of
India. It was upon such authenticity, as they knew, that criteria of nation-
ness had to be based. As a result, there was a certain touchiness about the
question of authenticity that dogged many a debate in which it ought to
have been irrelevant. Matters were not made any clearer by the fact that
many of the aspects of Indian ‘tradition’ hailed as properly indigenous
could be shown, on closer scrutiny, to have been invented in the recent
past. There was also the related danger of rendering an ‘authentic’ Indian
tradition as a ‘Hindu’ one: ancient Indian achievements, glorified by
Orientalists from Britain and Europe (and, not coincidentally, seen as
‘Aryan’ achievements), were situated in a so-called ‘Hindu’ period of
Indian history. This glorious civilisation had been destroyed, according
to British accounts of that history, by ‘Muslim invasion’. The British
version cast the British themselves as rescuers of India from this fate; many
Indian nationalists’ versions simply added the British to the list of invaders
and destroyers of ancient glory, leaving the role of recovery to themselves
as nationalists. But such nationalism, even when only inadvertently
exclusionary, was unlikely to have any takers among Indian Muslims, cast
as outsiders, invaders and barbarians in their own country’s national
mythology.
It was in this political environment that Jawaharlal Nehru found
himself an unlikely leader. As a self-confessed adherent of ‘modern’ values,
he was aware that the ‘modern’ had to be carefully separated from the
‘Western’. This ‘modernity’ could then be considered universal, rather
than ‘Western’, thereby avoiding being disqualified as not properly
‘indigenous’. Nehru could not honestly claim the authenticity of an
‘indigenous’ culture, not merely due to his largely British educational
background (this would have been shared by a number of members of
the new Indian middle classes that grew up under colonial rule, who
nonetheless sought to claim that authenticity in various ways). He was
INTRODUCTION 9