Conclusion to Part II: Greater India as a Political Discourse in the Interwar Period

Summary

The previous chapters probed how Rabindranath Tagore, Kalidas Nag, Benoy Kumar Sarkar and a wider range of scholars affiliated with the GIS turned the research paradigm of Greater India into a political discourse during the interwar period. It became apparent that the appeal of the Greater India idea was not limited to its utility as an historical argument that could expose and correct the biased and often racist accounts of British historians. Greater India was a historical canvas on which Indian intellectuals projected contesting visions of India’s civilizational self. Alternative visions of a historical Greater India were, in turn, evoked to match different ideological imperatives and visions of world order. In the process, Greater India became a tool for both nation-building and transnational alliance formation in the interwar period, and reconfigured the very “idea of India.”