Identity and religion: Foundations of Anti-Islamism in India,
By Amalendu Misra,
Sage, Rs 520

Anti-Islamism as a political ideology was not invented by the modern Hindutva forces. A huge corpus of post-colonial studies on Indian nationalism indicates that Indian nationalists were a sceptical lot when it came to Islam?s contribution to Indian history. Even a secularist like Nehru and a staunch moralist like Gandhi had problems in integrating that specific segment of history into the Indian way of life and thinking.

In Identity and Religion, Misra selects four great nationalist thinkers and analyses their views on Muslim rule and their assessments of Islam. Vivekananda, writes Misra, was a Hindu revivalist who wanted to blend the spiritual dimensions of Hinduism with the physical prowess of Islam to bring forth a new nation that had ?the body of Islam and mind of Vedanta?. Gandhi, according to Misra, was opposed to Vivekananda on this. He did not believe in such a superficial amalgamation which would lead to the Islamization of Hinduism. Rather, he stressed on the commonalities between the two religions but still ended up propagating a Hindu supremacist position. Nehru was more of a Hindu inclusivist than a hard-core secularist in the Western sense of the term. One would also agree with Misra when he brands Savarkar?s punyabhumi ? pitribhumi theory as an alternative version of Jinnah?s two-nation theory.

Misra also tries to show how the Hindu perceptions of Islam and the Muslim rule were influenced by tendentious interpretations of the same by British historians like Alexander Dow, James Mill and Mountstuart Elphinstone.

Misra?s views, however, elude certain crucial points. He does not pay adequate attention to the emerging secular culture in colonial India. The secular was an autonomous space, but it was closely linked to religion. As a result, there was a regular exchange of myths and images between the two domains. Once imported, the religious myths were often demystified and re-invested with secular meanings. The Hindu vocabulary of nationalist thinkers consisted, more often than not, of these transferred myths attached to secular moorings.

Misra is also oblivious of Muslim nationalist ideologues of the colonial era. One wonders why readers should be left in the dark about their construction of Muslim nationalism. Misra?s book, thus, fails to refute the structural biases which, he thinks, has plagued Indian nationalism since the moment of its inception.