4 - British India and the Quest for a New Orientalism

Summary

This chapter examines the goals and activities of the Calcutta-based Greater India Society (GIS). Building on Kalidas Nag and P.C. Bagchi’s study-sojourn in Paris and research trips to Leiden, the GIS became, in the mid-1920s, the South Asian node in the transimperial knowledge network of ‘Greater India’. The GIS set new terms for the writing of Indian history and popularized the notion of India as Asia’s civilizational fount and cultural linchpin, not only in Bengal but across the subcontinent. The Greater India movement endorsed a pedagogical mission to rectify the ‘splendid isolation’ myth, an important trope in British colonial histories of the subcontinent, and postulated India as a shaper of world history no less than the West and a prominent trading power, colonizer and civilizer in the Asian sphere. When the European powers gradually started losing grip on their colonies, the notion of ‘Greater India’ allowed Indian intellectuals to imagine an empire of their own. Although it was located in the distant past, it served the purposes of the present and the research paradigm of Greater India energized, in the Indian context, anti-colonial and nationalist agendas.