Staging the Nation Beyond the Raj: Transcolonial Knowledge Networks and Visions of Greater India, 1800-1950s

Staging the Nation Beyond the Raj opens a new perspective on the intellectual history of anti-colonial nationalism and Asianism in interwar British India by offering a wide-ranging and pioneering study of the Greater India imagination. Greater India referred to an ancient cultural geography or civilizational sphere, extending from Central Asia to the Pacific, which had allegedly been shaped by the transregional circulation of Indian art, religions and culture. The thesis charts the emergence and politics of Indocentric approaches to the cultural heritage of the wider Asian sphere from the late eighteenth century onwards, and reconstructs the transcolonial Orientalist knowledge networks linking Paris, Leiden, Hanoi, Batavia and Calcutta that energized the research paradigm of Greater India studies in the 1920s and 30s. It demonstrates that archaeological expeditions in Southeast and Central Asia, and Indological studies pursued by scholars in Paris and Leiden, had a significant and lasting impact on the historical imagination of Rabindranath Tagore and a new generation of prominent Indian intellectuals, including Jawaharlal Nehru, B. K. Sarkar, Kalidas Nag, K. A. Nilakanta Sastri, S. K. Chatterjee, P. C. Bagchi and R. C. Majumdar. The thesis foregrounds the crucial role of the Calcutta-based Greater India Society (GIS) in popularizing a nationalist historical narrative in which the nation was staged as a shaper of world-history and a great civilizing force, as well as fount of artistic impulses, in the wider Asian sphere. By showing that Greater India was a highly versatile concept tied to divergent, though partly overlapping, nationalist, anti-colonial and Asianist agendas in British India, this study sheds new light on the nexus between the historical imagination and emerging visions of ‘India’ as a national and civilizational entity in the interwar period. The study combines imperial, global and intellectual history with a social history approach, and draws on a vast range of sources collected in India, Britain, Germany, France and the Netherlands, and speaks directly to the contestations over ‘the idea of India’ that defines and divides the nation today. The study will be of interest to scholars and students of imperial and global history and South Asia Studies, as well as scholars interested in the politics of cultural heritage in the wider Asian sphere.