DIFFERENT NATIONALISMS: BENGAL, 1905-1947 By Semanti Ghosh, Oxford, Rs 995

Intellectual history scholarship on colonial Bengal has witnessed a resurgence in recent years, redrawing the contours of not only South Asian studies, but of global history as such. Historians like Andrew Sartori, Kris Manjapra and Neilesh Bose have used Bengali political thought as a point of departure to mould the nascent domain of transnational/global intellectual history. Through hands like theirs, as also of historians working on other regions of South Asia, notably Faisal Devji and Shruti Kapila, intellectual history has gone beyond its traditional focus on Europe and North America, and instead begun taking serious account of the role of extra-European intellectual production in shaping globalized political horizons. Semanti Ghosh's monograph adds to this emergent field, as she uses discourses from early-mid 20th-century Bengal to destabilize conventional definitions of nationalism and (unitary) statehood.

Academic - and extra-academic - debates on nationalism, in South Asia and beyond, have for long been hijacked by monolithic definitions of nationhood. In scholarship on Bengal, debates about 'Hindu' and 'Muslim' nationalism (or, for many, 'communalism') remain haunted and stultified by such definitions. Ghosh intervenes here by positing multi-scalar - and, in constitutionalist terms, federalist - conceptualizations of nationhood. One may or may not agree with her ideological predilections for federalist nationhood. However, Ghosh definitively establishes that, for many Bengali thinkers between the 1910s and 1940s, federalist and pluricentric structures of nationhood and governance had more appeal than the kind of monochromatic ideas of majoritarian nationalism/communalism and unitary nation-state sovereignty that later scholars have (Ghosh believes, unjustly) largely focused on, occluding other visions. Ghosh especially lionizes two figures, Chittaranjan Das and Fazlul Huq.

While Das and Huq are celebrated politicians, Ghosh demonstrates they were original thinkers too. For both, the 'region' constituted a conceptual dyad with '(con-) federation', allowing Bengal to aim for a local autonomy which would unite Hindus and Muslims in a shared framework of local self-governance. Underlying their programmes were sophisticated grammars of politics. For Das, as Subhas Chandra Bose later underlined, a pact or contract - sharing the model of commercial agreements - brought individuals and communities together in spite of their divergent ideological-religious orientations. One sees how underlying the famous Bengal Pact of 1923, there was, I feel, a quasi-Lockean model of politico-economic social contract. Contract, rather than the (mere) affective bonds of love and sacrifice celebrated by earlier Swadeshi nationalism, anchored Das's vision of inter-communal harmony.

Ghosh shows how Huq similarly created a dialectic between vocabularies of 'confederation' and 'sovereignty'. Huq's sense of 'region' had its politico-economic rationale: of agrarian interest, of the class-inflected bonds that created a common ground between Muslim and Hindu peasants. Seen in this light, Huq's 1943 proposal for 'Chashistan' seems less a quixotic hope, and more an innovative geography emanating out of the exigencies of an insurgent peasantry that wished to get rid of both colonial and zamindari heteronomy. Here, Ghosh complements Sartori's recent book, which shows how Bengali Muslim peasant thinking constructed Lockean equations between labour, freedom, and political and property rights in a milieu of growing commercialization in the Bengal countryside.

Ghosh further links federalist imaginings in politics with debates in literature and theology. She thus shows how Rabindranath Tagore felt that a language needed a centre, a capital, as well as a classicist kernel. Contrastively, for Kazi Nazrul Islam, literary language gained from decentring; hence local dialect idioms, including the language of common Muslims, enriched Bengali poesis. Simultaneously, scholars like Dineshchandra Sen, Abdul Karim Sahityabisharad, and Muhammad Shahidullah underlined the pluralized formation of Bengali literary registers since the precolonial centuries. Further, Ghosh detects a federalism-influenced metaphysics among certain Bengali thinkers too, including in Bipin Chandra Pal's notions of religion and selfhood (sva). Meanwhile, Kazi Mohammad Idris, editor of the journal, Millat, a mouthpiece of popular Bengali Muslim politics in the 1940s, saw svadroha (literally, revolt against the self) as cardinal to self-transcendence; this philosophy stemmed from an imperative to forge regionally-oriented trans-sectarian bonds.

For Ghosh, the Partition of Bengal in 1947 represented an antithesis of such pluralist imaginings. But, she argues, historians would be mistaken if they viewed the entire political thinking of the interwar years through the telos of 1947. Interwar Bengal saw the birth of novel imaginings of the region and the locality, often inflected towards popular (and especially peasant) hopes, and capable of forging trans-sectarian political communities. Defeated in the 1940s through a combination of British political engineering, the manoeuvrings of the centralist politicians of the Congress and the Muslim League, and the failures of Bengali politicians in addressing the socio-economic anxieties of lower-class Bengalis through trans-communitarian idioms, such federalist concepts, Ghosh feels, can still inspire and stimulate our politics now.

Ghosh occasionally alludes to regionalist ideas among non-Brahmanical communities like the Namashudras. My own research on the Rajavamshis, and especially on the interwar Rajavamshi leader, Panchanan Barma, as well as on Tripura's 'tribal' actors, including the famed Dasarath Deb, convinces me about the valence of regionalist and federalist imaginings among various (so-called 'lower caste') peasant and 'tribal' communities of late colonial and early postcolonial eastern India. (Such demands for decentring control continue to reverberate today, including among Rajavamshi activists in Bengal, as also across north-eastern India.) Ghosh also occasionally speaks about the traction of extra-Indian models of federalism, including American and Soviet ones, among Bengali actors. The author, one hopes, will pursue this avenue of research more comprehensively in a future opus. The early-mid 20th century was a time of widespread experiments in federalism across the British Empire, the French Empire (as Frederick Cooper has most recently underlined), and the Soviet Union. The latter experiment influenced Bengali socialists and communists in particular, as they debated over multi-national confederation models in the 1940s. Ghosh would enrich debates in 20th-century global intellectual history if she links her Bengali case studies more extensively to these other horizons; some of the primary sources she quotes point to the rich possibilities. The book, as it stands, is, however, already a landmark. Going beyond the worn dyad of 'nationalism' and 'communalism', it brilliantly persuades the reader to adopt federalist lenses in visualizing the politics, literature, and metaphysics of late colonial Bengal.