Why Lala Lajpat Rai saw ‘religious nationalism’ and ‘communal patriotism’ as false ideas

According to his biographer, his work with the colonial regime (in which he focused on free primary education in Hindi and electric street lights, among other things) led British officials to soften their image of Lajpat Rai as a political conspirator or revolutionary, and they now began to view him as a reasonable man. On his own admission, and not unrelated to the surveillance he had been under, during these years Rai, for the most part, avoided saying anything ‘unpleasant on political subjects’. This changed with his election (alongside, among others, M.A. Jinnah) to a Congress deputation to England following its 1913 Karachi session.

Arriving in England in May 1914 for what he thought was a six-month trip, Lajpat Rai spent time mingling with leading socialist politicians and intellectuals, including Keir Hardie, Sydney and Beatrice Webb, and George Bernard Shaw, and got interested in the British labour and trade union movement. He had plans to proceed to Europe, but these were thwarted when the First World War broke out in July. So, Lajpat Rai remained in England, writing a book on the history of the Arya Samaj and his autobiography The Story of My Life (both of which have been important sources for this book). Unable to return to India even after six months, Lajpat Rai decided to cross the Atlantic, and landed in the United States of America in late November. Apart from six months in Japan in the latter half of 1915, Lajpat Rai spent the next five years, till December 1919, in the United States.

A brush with progressive circles

Living in New York City for the most part, he came in contact with several progressive circles. Armed with a letter of introduction from Sidney Webb, Lajpat Rai met the renowned Columbia University economist Edwin R. A. Seligman, who introduced him to other members of the University and other personalities in New York. Seligman invited him to attend the annual meetings of the American Economic, Sociological and Statistical Association in Princeton.

In New York, Lajpat Rai met the journalist and editor of the progressive liberal magazine New Republic, Walter Lippmann. He acquainted himself with progressive intellectuals from Harvard, Stanford and the University of California, Berkeley. Eager to grasp the workings of American society and politics, Lajpat Rai travelled across the States, visiting various cities including Boston, Washington, Chicago, Atlanta, New Orleans, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Berkeley.

Keen to understand the ‘Negro problem’, Lajpat Rai came in contact with NAACP (the National Association for the Advancement of Colored Peoples) founders W.E.B. Du Bois and Oswald Villard, the African–American educator Booker T. Washington of the Tuskegee Institute, and the first African–American president of Morehouse College, John Hope.

During his travels to the South, Lajpat Rai was shocked to witness the unabashed racism of Jim Crow America. Attending a screening of D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (which he wrote of as a ‘play of the Ku Klux Clansmen’ [sic]), he noted the frenzied passion this film aroused in the audience, which ‘reached the highest pitch of race hatred’. Lajpat Rai recorded his impressions about America in a book written in 1915 titled The United States of America: A Hindu’s Impressions and a Study.

The shift in his conception of nationhood

Both during his travels and his stay in New York City, Lajpat Rai came in touch with Indian diasporic circles, meeting young Indian students and many Ghadar revolutionaries (of whom he remained critical). He met the young M.N. Roy, one of the central figures of early Indian communism, twenty-five-year-old B.R. Ambedkar (a PhD student of Seligman’s at Columbia University), and Rabindranath Tagore on his brief visit to the States.

During his long stay in New York, Lajpat Rai cultivated and maintained friendships with Irish-American anti-imperialists, several liberal and socialist intellectuals, and feminist activists like Agnes Smedley and Henrietta Rodman. Many of these individuals would associate themselves with the India Home Rule League of America that Lajpat Rai founded in October 1917 to ‘spread correct knowledge of Indian affairs in America’ and win the sympathy of Americans for the Indian cause. In 1918, Rai also established Young India, a monthly publication he wrote for and edited from New York till he left America in late 1919.

As interesting as Lajpat Rai’s activities, experiences, interactions and reflections about America was the significant shift in Lajpat Rai’s conception of nationhood that is noticeable from early 1915. In the past, he had occasionally — as in 1901 — dismissed the notion of Indian nationality as a false idea. At other times, as in 1909, he affirmed his belief in an overarching Indian nation that accommodated Hindus and Muslims. Either way, he remained strongly tied to the notion that Hindus and Muslims constituted separate cultural nations.

A single ‘Indian’ nation for Hindus and Muslims

Even as he ultimately envisioned them as constituting a common, overarching ‘Indian’ political community or nation (in its modern nationalist sense, with connotations of self-government and statehood), Lajpat Rai struggled to articulate and imagine what, if anything, Hindus and Muslims shared in common culturally and historically as ‘Indians’. Indeed, despite affirming the idea of a common Indian nation, and in turn implicitly conceding the notion of Hindus and Muslims being bound by common political interests, he often saw the discrete Hindus and Muslim cultural nations as mostly having distinct (and often competitive) political interests.

Rather than elaborating a thickly textured, common Indian national cultural identity for Hindus and Muslims over and above their particular religious or cultural identities, or attempting to unite them, he argued that the separate cultural and even political strengthening of India’s Hindu and Muslim nations was the best means to strengthen the Indian nation; Lajpat Rai’s first and overwhelming priority, then, remained to articulate a common national identity for Hindus, and to strengthen and unite this ‘Hindu nation’. Broadly, then, till now, Lajpat Rai had remained much more a ‘Hindu nationalist’ than an ‘Indian nationalist’ (even though, as we have seen, his Hindu nationalism remained distinct from the Hindutva nationalist ideology Savarkar was about to elaborate).

This is what changed in early 1915, from when Lajpat Rai’s vision of nationhood underwent what seems like a perfect inversion. The fifty-year-old Rai now explicitly criticized ‘religious nationalism’ and ‘communal patriotism’ as ‘false ideas’, and consistently insisted that India’s Hindus and Muslims belonged to a single ‘Indian’ nation.

What precisely triggered this change? One answer to this question is that Rai’s changed geographical location and new remoteness from India provided him with a new global sense through which differences between Hindus and Muslims began to look less significant, inducing him to shift to a different conception of nationhood. Indeed, a slight shift began to occur whilst he was in England itself.

The above-mentioned ideas were articulated by Lala Lajpat Rai in the third phase of his political life, which is covered in the third part of the book. Excerpted with permission from Penguin Random House India.