BEFORE DISSENT, NEED PLAYFULNESS IN NATIONALISM

Nationalism did not begin with the nation-state. Both Tagore and Gandhi underlined the need for playfulness in the national imagination and dreamt of an alternative childhood

- SHIV VISVANATHAN

WHENEVER I try to balance between the esoteric and the everyday, my mind tends to go back to the memory of my teacher, Ramchandra Gandhi.

He was a remarkable philosopher, an authority on mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead. I still remember the way Ramu would come to class and quote Whitehead’s lecture at Harvard. Whitehead had apparently once walked into the classroom, banged his head gently, and said, “Gentlemen, I have disturbed the most distant star,” referring to the interconnectedness of the cosmos.

For Ramu, communication and connectivity were part of everyday life. The way he linked them reminds me of the way he used to talk about nationalism. For Ramchandra Gandhi, nationalism was a filigreed moment—full of nuances, a dissenting imagination that created a pluralistic world.

For him, deep down inside, nationalism was a different way of looking at reality—a dream world that created a sense of alternatives. Within this context, he pointed out that the world of nationalism was not actually an invention of the nation-state. For India, and in fact for many nationalists, the dream of nationalism was a dream of inventing an alternative childhood.

Childhood, in fact, was the focus of many nationalist moments. It’s best captured in Rabindranath Tagore’s statement: “Every child born today is an indication that god is not yet tired of man.” In this sense, Tagore captured the essence of the Indian national movement.