Nation and Civilisation in Modern Indian Social and Political Thought

Abstract

Instead of viewing Western Political Theory and Modern Indian Social and Political Thought as complete binaries, the paper views them as complementary to each other. It (i) argues that the dominant post-Cold War Western theories of nation and civilization are anomalous and therefore its universalist-theoretical claim is self-contradictory; (ii) posits ‘Social and Political Theory’ per se as one composite heritage – common to both the West and the Global South; and (iii) seeks to find out how Modern Indian Social and Political Thought plays a key role in the making of ‘Social and Political Theory’ side by side with the Western theories. We situate Modern Indian Social and Political Thought neither in its splendid isolation from the theories of the West, nor as one single, coherent and perfectly homogenized body of thought, but primarily as a mode of engagement with the Western theories in a way that helps address and wherever possible resolve the anomalies that they have developed and find impossible to resolve on their own. We make albeit select reference to three Indian thinkers – Swami Vivekananda (1863-1902), Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) and Ramananda Chatterjee (1865-1943) - who were writing their discourses in the cusp of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.