The Nationalist Sociology of

Benoy Kumar Sarkar1

Roma Chatterji

FOR STUDENTS IN MOST SOCIOLOGY DEPARTMENTS IN INDIA

today, Benoy Kumar Sarkar (1887-1949) represents at best a footnote

in the history of Indian sociology. His work is still taught in univer¬
sities in Bengal, but more as homage to a regional tradition of social
science than because of his contribution to mainstream sociology.
Yet in his day he was known as a cosmopolitan scholar with impres¬
sive knowledge of Europe and the US based on a mastery of several
European languages. He was also a renowned teacher and introduced
the study of modern sociological texts into the institutions where he
taught. Why then does he find no place in our institutional memory?
I attempt to address this question by locating his work in the historical
period within which he wrote. This entails a twofold engagement:
with his life on the one hand, and with the social scientists that he
interacted with on the other. As I will show, he was a nationalist and
a political activist, as well as a scholar who had a living relationship
with ideas current in his time. For him, sociology offered a way of
addressing India’s contemporary concerns and all his writings are

1 I am grateful to Andre Beteille and Satish Saberwal for introducing me to

the work of B.K. Sarkar; also to Nandini Sundar, Satish Deshpande, Patricia
Uberoi, and Deepak Mehta, who have commented on successive drafts of this
paper.
 THE NATIONALIST SOCIOLOGY OF BENOY KUMAR SARKAR 107

Fig. 3: Portrait of Benoy Kumar Sarkar (1887-1949)

(Source: Swapan Kumar Bhattacharyya, Indian sociology: The role of
Benoy Kumar Sarkar, Burdwan: University of Burdwan Press, 1990)
108 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

constructed like conversations or discussions around significant

events, particularly those that concerned India’s sovereignty.
Sarkar’s scholarly concerns were shaped by his participation in
the Swadeshi (self-rule) Movement in Bengal (1905-7), especially
by his association with the Dawn Society, started by Satishchandra
Mukherjee in 1902, which propagated the study of Indian culture,
particularly of the country’s distinctive spiritual traditions.2 Sarkar
was also a teacher in the Bengal National College set up in 1906 by
the National Council of Education as an alternative to colonial insti¬
tutions of learning in Bengal.3
However, Sarkar’s scholarship, while remaining faithful to the
nationalistic sentiment of the Dawn Society, took a radically different
turn fairly early on in his intellectual career. Thus, instead of affirming
the spiritual distinctiveness of India’s culture and therefore of the
national movement as an idealistic movement against an alien West¬
ern ideal, he tried to demonstrate the materialistic or ‘positive’ orient¬
ation of Indian culture. He argued that this orientation not only
legitimised India’s claim to self-governance (swaraj) but also showed
Western representations of Indian ‘otherworldliness’ as feeble at¬
tempts at rationalising colonial rule.
Scholars like Tagore (1999) and Coomaraswamy (1981) had pro¬
posed that India, having never sought political domination over other
nations, offered a distinctive spiritual ideal, and that her independ¬
ence would therefore benefit the world at large. Sarkar, on the con¬
trary, seemed to accept the fact of political domination as a universal
phenomenon and took pride in demonstrating that Indian history
showed her as capable as any Western colonial power of exercising
‘brute force’ in the interests of imperial domination. He used a com¬
parative perspective to argue that, since India’s history showed rem¬
arkable parallels with those of other nations, she too was capable of

2 Regular classes were held on the Bhagvat Gita, on the ancient village
community as a self-governing unit, on national enlightenment, and on spiritual
traditions. The Dawn Society also emphasised the study of Western philosophy
and history. The emphasis was on moral and spiritual education. For a compre¬
hensive history of the Swadeshi Movement, see Sarkar (1973).
3 In 1907, he also helped establish the District Council of National Education
in Malda, Bengal, which ran several schools in the district as well as a research
institute for the study of the folk culture of Malda.
 THE NATIONALIST SOCIOLOGY OF BENOY KUMAR SARKAR 109

functioning independently and forming a nation state (see Sarkar

1936).
What caused the shift in Sarkar’s ideas on Indian nationalism?
To answer this question we have to first examine the discourse on
nationalism as it emerges through an interface with the discourse
on Western imperialism and colonisation. Unfortunately, a detailed
discussion on this is beyond the scope of this essay. However, I will
give a brief account of Tagore’s views on nationalism and its space
within Indian civilisation so as to understand Sarkar’s brand of mili¬
tant nationalism and its appropriation of disciplines like history and
To understand why Sarkar's ideas on Indian nationalism changed, we first need to look at how
sociology. nationalism developed in relation to Western imperialism and colonization.

I. HISTORY AND INDIAN CIVILISATION

Concepts such as autonomy, freedom, and distinctiveness constituted

part of the important themes around which debates on national¬
ism cohered. Coomaraswamy and Tagore thought of autonomy and
freedom as spiritual ideals. For Tagore, India’s distinctiveness and
her contribution to world civilisation lay in the coexistence here of
different races. India’s history showed a process of continuous self¬
regulation, of a social adjustment of differences such that these could
be organised into a spiritual unity. Tagore did not feel that the forma¬
tion of a nation-state would contribute to the maintenance of this
spiritual unity. He thought that the idea of the ‘nation’ was a negative
ideal, expressing a kind of collective insecurity that led to the ex¬
ploitation of‘no-nations’ such as India. The West had developed an
exploitative relationship to the rest of the world as a result of its
enhanced technological and organisational capacity. This acted as a
‘goad’, stimulating ‘greed for material prosperity’, which in turn sti¬
mulated jealousy between various groups of people. Power thus
became a ruling force rationalised by the ideology of nationalism.
Sarkar would have agreed with Tagore’s analysis. He too believed
that power was articulated effectively with the help of science and
required organisational support. But, unlike Tagore, he thought of
power as a positive force and science as a form of practical rationality.
Giuseppe Flora (n.d.), a historian who has written extensively on
Sarkar, says that his particular orientation to Indian civilisation was
characteristic of nineteenth century Bengal. Positivist ideas spread
110 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

as a result of the establishment of scientific institutions like the

Calcutta Medical College in 1835, the Calcutta Mechanics Institute
in 1839, and the Linnean Society of India in 1840. Efforts were made
to synthesise Hinduism with positivist values (see also Raychaudhuri
1995). However, there was an abrupt reversal of this trend with the
partition of Bengal and the rise of the Swadeshi Movement. Satish
Chandra Mukherjee, founder of the Dawn Society, was influenced
by Swami Vivekananda, opposed spiritualism to positivism, and stres¬
sed the significance of India’s spiritual tradition for the modern
world. In fact, Sarkar adopted this position in his early writings, when
he was still a member of the Dawn Society. Later, in his mature work,
he referred to this perspective on Indian civilisation as a kind of veil,
an appearance that India took on when she came face-to-face with
the outside world; but the core of her being was materialist.
What brought about this change in Sarkar’s thinking? He himself
attributed it to his discovery of Shukraniti, a classical text on the
science of government which was thought to have been composed
in the fourteenth century. Sarkar thought that Shukraniti was unique
in that it offered practical guidance to the ruler and was not merely
a philosophical treatise. It offered detailed information on the grada¬
tions of feudatories, councils of ministers, financial budgets, adminis¬
tration, and so on. In addition, it linked this pragmatic discussion
of government to the goals of purushartha, namely, dharma, artha,
kama, moksha, and to the swadharma of the ruler whose duty it was
to sustain the particular swadharma of his subjects (see Acharya 1987;
Sarkar 1939). The 'discovery’ of this text allowed Sarkar to place his
research on Indian politics, history, and culture within an interna¬
tional perspective without losing his nationalistic moorings. He could
acknowledge the specificity of India’s national culture while at the
same time emphasising her common destiny with national move¬
ments elsewhere.
Sarkar’s encounter with Shukraniti not only shaped his under¬
standing of Indian nationalism but also influenced the way he ap¬
proached Western scholarship in general and sociology in particular.
Even though he never thought of himself as a professional sociologist,
his reading of certain sociological classics configured his discourse
 THE NATIONALIST SOCIOLOGY OF BENOY KUMAR SARKAR 111

in a particular way. I will here use the sociological ideas that he refers
to in his writings as a point of entry into his nationalist writings and
demonstrate that the work of social philosophers and sociologists
like Tonnies, von Wiese, Gumplowicz, Ratzenhofer, and Haushofer
were important influences on his thought. To this end, my discussion
will focus on texts that are considered somewhat marginal within
his corpus, namely The sociology of population (1936) and The political
philosophies since 1905 (1942). I refer to his more famous works like
The positive background of Hindu sociology (1937), Villages and towns
as social patterns (1941a), and Tolk elements in Hindu culture (1941b)
only to exemplify his sociological perspective. My discussion is also
informed by Benoy Kumarer Boithoke (1944), edited by Haridas
Mukhopadhya, which consists of a series of discussions between Sar-
kar and his students on ideas and events that shaped his intellectual
life.
Sarkar was a prolific writer. He used his writing as occasion to
engage with authors and events that concerned him at the time of
writing. He was interested less in presenting a coherent body of ideas
than in provoking discussion. Each of his books is a moment in his
engagement with Indian society and her national movement. Only
by focusing on these lesser-known texts may one come to grips with
his style of writing, with the fact that he thought of ideas only within
particular conversational contexts and as intimately associated with
his life and that of the Indian nation. For him—and this applies to
other Bengali nationalists as well—engagement with Western thought
enabled thinking about Indian civilisation as inherently cosmopoli¬
tan and therefore modern. However, to understand the particular
way in which he appropriated sociology, some discussion on his use
of the historical method is necessary.
Gadamer (2000), in his seminal work on hermeneutics and the
Romantic movement, says that history, after Spinoza, came to be
seen as a form of inquiry for approaching phenomena that seemed
at first sight unintelligible. What made sense could be grasped at
first sight; what did not required a detour into history. History be¬
came a kind of laboratory for the comparative study of social insti¬
tutions and even a resource that nations could use in their struggle
112 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

for existence, as well as a way of understanding their present. It was

through the study of ancient texts that the past was made available.
They represented, as it were, the biographies of nations.
It is in this context that we must examine Sarkar’s translation of
the Shukraniti. He thought of it as part of a comparative study on
India’s materialist past that would provide an important counter to
transcendentalist representations of Indian civilisation. He thought
that this text, which he claimed had been composed in the fourteenth
century, provided evidence of an unbroken tradition of political
philosophy in India from the time of the Mauryan dynasty, represent¬
ed by Kautilya’s Arthashastra, to that of the Sultanate period when
Muslim rule was established in India. However, more recent works
on the Shukraniti, like that of Lallanji Gopal (1978), tend to place it
in the nineteenth century and even speculate that it may have been
a forgery (see Flora n.d.). Be that as it may, this text allowed Sarkar
to counter arguments that were current in Bengal from the late nine¬
teenth century which claimed that politics, as a category of knowledge
and practice, was alien to Indian consciousness.
History, embodied in texts like the Shukraniti, became an ideo¬
logical weapon for Sarkar. Kaviraj (1995) shows how history becomes
an important symbol in the consciousness of colonial Bengali in¬
tellectuals. In the discourse of colonial Indology, history is thought
of as an attribute characterising the difference between mystical India
and the rational, scientific West. However, as Kaviraj argues, history
became a double-edged weapon in the hands of nationalist Indian
scholars who used it to point to the ‘constructedness of the past’ and
to argue against essentialist representations of India. Kaviraj says
that history showed a world in the making, a contingent world, in
which social arrangements were fluid and open-ended, pointing to
alternative possibilities that could be logically plausible even if never
actualised. In this view history can allow the free play of imagination,
becoming a root myth for colonised people.
Sarkar saw his efforts in describing the materialist history of India
as a confrontation between ancient India and the India of his time.
As mentioned, he thought that representations of Indian spiritualism
were ways of rationalising her ‘enslavement’ by the West. Thus, if
India could be shown to have no social, political, or economic insti¬
tutions of her own, that is, no history worth recording, then it could
 THE NATIONALIST SOCIOLOGY OF BENOY KUMAR SARKAR 113

be argued that it was her destiny to be ruled by others (Mukhopadhya

1944). History, then, became a way of making the past a presence in
the consciousness of colonial India, of establishing relations of com¬
monality between institutions described in ancient texts and those
in contemporary India. For colonial Indians like Sarkar, it was a way
of making the present intelligible.

II. SOCIOLOGY AS A PERSPECTIVE ON

HUMAN CIVILISATION

Sarkar’s ‘sociological’ concerns were shaped by the teachings of the

Dawn Society, especially by Brajendranath Seal who helped introduce
sociology in Calcutta University in 1917. Radhakamal Mukherjee
and Benoy Kumar Sarkar were the first to teach sociology there.
Sarkar took from Seal the idea that Indian institutions had to be
studied from the perspective of comparative sociology. This involved
the study of cross-cutting influences of race, religion, and culture
on social institutions as well as comparisons of the history and
development of ideas embodied in them. It did not refer to a method
per se but rather to an orientation that was sensitive to other cultures.
A delineation of Sarkar’s sociological lineage is extremely difficult.
This is not merely because his definition of the discipline was
expansive—he thought sociology was concerned with social philoso¬
phy and social reform—but also because of his pedagogic concerns.
He believed that sociology was a way of sensitising young minds to
other civilisations and he was not particularly interested in its estab¬
lishment as a rigorous discipline within the Indian university struc¬
ture. Thus he never actually systematised his ideas about sociology,
nor discussed the influence of contemporary sociological writing
on his work. However, there is at least one essay in which he does
discuss sociology as such. This is the expanded version of his presi¬
dential address to the sociology section of the first Indian Population
Conference held in Lucknow in 1936, later reproduced in his book
The sociology of population (1936). Here he discusses several different
perspectives on the subject and lays out his own scheme of the broad
areas of study that could be included under the rubric of sociology.
Thus, ‘sociology’ is divided into the following themes and pers¬
pectives:
114 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

A. Theoretical Sociology
1. Institutional sociology (family, property, state, myth, arts and crafts,
sciences, mores, languages)
a. Anthropology and history as well as sociography
b. Social philosophy and philosophical history

2. Psychological sociology, sociology proper in the narrow sense

C. Social psychology
d. Social processes and social forms

B. Applied Sociology
The study of attempts at remaking of man, societal planning and the
transformation of the world by promoting ‘social metabolism’ along
diverse fronts (Sarkar 1936: 8)

It is evident that Sarkar, in common with many sociologists writing

in the early decades of the twentieth century, used sociology to arti¬
culate their concerns with social reform. However, the specific orga¬
nisation of this schema does give us some insight into the kind of
sociology that Sarkar read and helps us in delineating a sphere of
scholarly influence.
Tonnies and later Ward make a distinction between pure and ap¬
plied sociology. Pure sociology is concerned with the formulation
of concepts that can be applied to the study of concrete historical
societies and social processes: for instance, gemeinschaft and gesells-
chafty which characterise two alternative modes of collective being.
Tonnies also introduces a third category—empirical sociology or
sociography, which is the description of social phenomena. Sarkar
reorganises this classification. Thus, the category ‘theoretical socio¬
logy’ includes the philosophical anthropology of scholars like Kant
and Montesquieu, as well as the comparative ethnology of Bachofen,
concerned with the ends and values of so-called universal human
institutions. Under the second item in this category, ‘psychological
sociology’, he included mainstream sociologists and other social
scientists who had influenced the development of sociology. He
thought that sociology was especially concerned with the psycho¬
logies of different societies that were to be studied from a comparative
perspective.
Mid 30s was the period when all scientists were writing about the social relations of science for
transforming and building nation but sarkar at that time was dividing and discussing about sociology with
a similar concern
 THE NATIONALIST SOCIOLOGY OF BENOY KUMAR SARKAR 115

Sarkar was clearly not interested in pure sociology’ as such, even

though von Wiese—a ‘formal sociologist’ who thought that the sub¬
ject matter of sociology should be restricted to the study of abstract
social forms and relationships—did have a significant influence on
his work, as we shall see. Sarkar is far more interested in applied
sociology—the study of‘human achievement’ and of structural chan¬
ges within groups and institutions, especially with a view to making
recommendations for future progress. He called this the ‘sociology
of social metabolism’.
In the category of‘psychological sociology’ Sarkar includes a host
of scholars such as Tonnies, Gumplowicz, Tarde, Ratzenhofer, Dur-
kheim, Le Bon, Simmel, Pareto, Small, Binet, Freud, Wallas, Ross,
Bogardus, McDougall, Salleilles, Wundt, Ellis, and Stanley Hall. These
scholars, together with von Wiese—for whom Sarkar reserves an
especial place in his conception of sociology—are fundamental for
the ‘enrichment’ of the discipline.
Even though Sarkar wrote passionately about the dynamism of
India’s traditional institutions and about the need for social recons¬
truction, he did very little empirical investigation of concrete insti¬
tutions.4 His interest in applied sociology was tied to his interest in
state formation. Everything that he wrote on social institutions (and
his writings range from essays on folk religion and traditional aes¬
thetics to modes of transport in medieval India and comparative
economics) is tied to a larger concern with Indian sovereignty. Thus,
Sarkar was drawn to sociologists like Ratzenhofer, Gumplowicz, and
Haushofer who wrote on geopolitics and state formation in broad
philosophical terms. I shall discuss their influence on Sarkar’s work
in the next section. Here I will focus instead on the two sociologists,
Tonnies and von Wiese, from whom Sarkar learnt that all social phe¬
nomena could be thought of as geometric patterns, but patterns that
were volitional and therefore inherently dynamic.
Sarkar read von Wiese’s Allgemeine Soziologie (1924, 1929) and
was fascinated by the idea that the study of abstract forms of social
relationships could be a sociological problem (Mukhopadhya 1944;

4 A significant exception is The folk elements of Hindu culture (1941), which

is a monograph on the Gambhira ritual complex of Malda.
116 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

Sarkar 1936). Von Wiese believed that sociology was concerned with
the isolation of the processes of sociation, of approach and with¬
drawal, which characterise all social behaviour. It was not concerned
with the functions of social institutions but only with the ‘rhythm
of sociation’. Rhythm has a temporal dimension which von Wiese
conceptualised in terms of‘direction’. Thus, forms of sociation and
relationship could be characterised in terms of particular styles of
movement and interaction (see Barnes 1948).
For Sarkar, von Wiese’s appeal lay in the range of phenomena
that the concepts of form and relation were able to capture. Thus, in
a discussion of von Wiese’s definition of sociology, Sarkar describes
social relations as being composed of phenomena like competition,
boycott, exploitation, and so on, while social forms were crystallis¬
ations of relations such as group, mass, state, people, nation, and
class. All such forms could be analysed in terms of association and
dissociation, by the kind of distance that people maintained in rela¬
tionships and by the direction that these relationships took. Thus
relations of association occurred in three phases or took three
forms—advance, adjustment, and amalgamation; and those of
dissociation—competition, contradiction, and conflict. Each of these
phases was characterised by a particular quality of difference and
mutuality between the participants in the relationship as well as a
particular emotional charge (see Barnes 1948). Sarkar found this
idea extremely attractive. By building ‘direction’ into his definition
of social relationship, he was able to capture its volitional nature.
Sarkar believed that all social formations were brought about by col¬
lective agency, which was why they could also be self-consciously re¬
constituted. However, he did not believe in the concept of a group
mind. Collectivities were made up of individuals who had the
freedom to express their differences. Sociology had to account for
the fact that individuals were both contained by forms of sociation
but could also confront them; they were both inside society as well
as outside it. This allowed Sarkar to consider the influence of leaders,
digbijoyee or ‘world conquerors’ to use his phrase, in the study of
‘social metabolism’. But, more importantly, it allowed Sarkar to syste¬
matise his ideas about Indian tradition as a product of a long process
 THE NATIONALIST SOCIOLOGY OF BENOY KUMAR SARKAR 117

of interaction between different cultures, of amalgamation, distanti-

ation and conflict, but also tentative appeasement. Other nationalist
scholars have also spoken of Indian civilisation in these terms, most
notably Tagore: but he thought this gave Indian society the quality
of unselfconsciousness. Sarkar held the opposite view and believed
that even colonisation was a willed relationship, which was why it
could also be repudiated.
From Tonnies, Sarkar took the idea that all forms of thought,
even seemingly irrational ones, were never completely unreasonable
because they were expressions of human will. Thus, gemeinschaft
and gesellschaft represented opposite potentialities. A group or
relationship could be willed because it was desirable for a definite
end; this was called kurwille or rational will, which is able to dis¬
tinguish between means and ends. Relationships could also be willed
out of sympathy or because the relationship was considered valuable
in itself. This was called wesenwille, any process of willing that arises
Gemeinschaft represents a small, tight-knit community,
from the character of the individual. while Gesellschaft represents a larger, more complex
society with less personal connection.
In Villages and towns as social patterns (1941a), Sarkar uses Tonnies’
distinction between wesenwille (‘natural will1 or action that may be
willed for its own sake or because of habit or inclination) and kurwille
(action that is consciously chosen) to the understanding of the
Krishna myth. The myth becomes a metaphor for Indian society
itself. Sarkar takes up the contrast between the two locales in which
the Krishna lila are played out, i.e. Vrindavana and Dwarka. Thus,
Vrindavana, the archetypal village is a gemeinschaft-like entity and
embodies the spirit ofprakriti or nature, while Dwarka is the product
of sanskara or sanskriti, i.e., man’s influence on nature and the spirit
of gesellschaft. The village/town distinction in the myth is represent¬
ed by a series of related oppositions. Thus, Vrindavana : Dwarka : :
sylvan scene : artificial, built landscape, and cowherd/pariah: sophis¬
ticated courtier : : Prakrit/primordial or natural language : Sanskrit/
artificial or cultivated language. Both sets of qualities are part of
Indian society. We shall see later that the co-presence of the registers
of the real and the imaginary is repeated in his materialist account
of Indian history. This inclusiveness allows him to use history as the
arena for his philosophical cogitation. History, for him, becomes a
118 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

horizon with shifting boundaries, or a landscape in which his theory

of geopolitics or vishwa shakti (world forces) is played out.

III. VISHWA-SHAKTI AND

CREATIVE DISEQUILIBRIUM

The previous section focused on Sarkar’s conception of sociology

and his emphasis on volition in the understanding of social pheno¬
mena. This section foregrounds his views on politics and on the state,
for he did not believe that society or ‘civilisation’ could be understood
apart from the political formations within which it was embodied.
Sarkar (1942) explicitly refers to Haushofer’s work on geopolitics,
on the notion that the state is a territorial embodiment of‘will force’
served by reason, that is, force that can be justified when it is in the
interest of the group. Haushofer was a scholar in the National Socialist
regime in Germany who had been responsible for inviting Sarkar to
the Technisce Hochschul in Munich in the 1930s. Buf Sarkar’s hist¬
orical canvas, the idea that groups are bonded together for survival
and that human interaction is primarily conflictual, driven as it is
by biological nature, is found in the works of Gumplowicz and
Ratzenhofer.5
Gumplowicz said that sociology is concerned with the study of
group interaction. Societies evolve out of such interaction, through
marriage alliances, economic interaction, and warfare. All societies
were held together by material interest. In due course different groups
coalesce to form states. The impetus for state formation originates
in the desire to subjugate others, which in turn leads to assimilation
with the subjugated groups, and finally to amalgamation with them.
This, according to Gumplowicz, is the process by which nations or

5 Gumplowicz (1838-1909) was Professor of Public Law at the University of

Graz, Austria, and is known for his pioneering work in establishing sociology
as a social science (see Barnes 1968). Ratzenhofer (1842-1904) wrote six books
on sociology after he retired from the Austrian army. He worked on the evolu¬
tion of types of human association and believed that all social phenomena
could be reduced to physical, chemical, and biological ones (see House 1968).
Both scholars were considered important in European and American sociology
in the early decades of the twentieth century.
 THE NATIONALIST SOCIOLOGY OF BENOY KUMAR SARKAR 119

‘folk states’ are formed—whereupon the process begins anew and

newly emergent states begin the process of subjugating other groups
once again. Ratzenhofer followed Gumplowicz in believing that
societies are composed of rival interest groups. However, he also
said that hostility between groups is limited by felt advantages of
cooperation, such as trade between states as well as other processes
of sharing. In the long term, he felt, such processes of limitation had
led to the development of civilisation. Ratzenhofer also believed that
‘interests’ foundational to the formation of society are, however, not
merely social or economic but could emerge from environmental or
chemical (that is, sexual) impulses as well.
The important points that Sarkar took from these two thinkers
were: (i) that material interest provides the dynamic force behind
social evolution; (ii) that such interests lead to conflict between
groups and individuals; (iii) that conflict is a creative force in history;
and (iv) that there is no such thing as infinite progress—all societies
go through cycles of progression and regression. These ideas form
the core of Sarkar’s account of Indian history. He is able to construct
a theory that can account for the seemingly contradictory processes
of colonisation which, as I have mentioned, is attributed to voluntary
self-subjugation as well as to the newly emergent desire for swaraj.
He says that both these desires are part of the universal process of
history shaped by the conflict between varying interest groups. He is
also able to give an alternative view of the colonisation process. As
remarked, according to Gumplowicz history occurs in three
successive cycles of subjugation, assimilation, and amalgamation.
Sarkar, in his discussion of the Muslim and British colonisation of
Bengal, uses this framework to argue for a reverse colonisation in
which Bengali culture is supposed to have amalgamated with the
so-called colonisers.
In The political philosophies since 1905 (1942) Sarkar talks of Ben¬
gali culture as the product of a continuous process of acculturation,
first with the conquering Vedic Indo-Aryans, and later with the
Buddhists and Hindus from Bihar, Punjab, and Kanauj. He says that
Bengali culture was invented by pariahs: ‘the aboriginals living in
hills, forests and river valleys, as well as the untouchable and depres¬
sed classes and some of the lower castes, nay, many of those castes
120 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

who have in subsequent ages got admitted into the alleged higher
castes may be regarded as descendents ... of pre-Vedic and pre-
Buddhist Bengalis . . .’ (Sarkar 1942:61). He claims that the nominal
conversion of Bengalis to Hinduism and Buddhism was the reason
why Islam was so widely accepted in Bengal. It was the religion of
the masses, while Hinduism was an elite religion restricted to the
aristocracy and ‘the commercial oligarchy’. Regardless of class con¬
siderations, however, Sarkar says that both Hinduism and Islam have
been completely ‘Bengalicised’, so that the customary practices of
both Hindu and Muslim Bengalis are more or less identical. Regard¬
ing periods closer to his own times, he says that the same tendencies
ff

can be discerned in the Bengali assimilation of Western ideas in the

nineteenth and twenteeth centuries, that is, from the Bengalicisation
of positivist rationalism by Rammohan Roy to the ‘Mystical duty
sense’ of Mazzini and Kant by Aurobindo. He calls this process of
assimilation a ‘conquest’, not so much by the colonising culture as
by the one that creatively adapts to and naturalises the foreign in¬
fluence.
It is interesting to note that Sarkar has to include Hinduism as a
colonising force when talking about Bengal. The uneasy relationship
between Bengali heterodoxy and mainstream Hinduism has been
widely documented. Vedic Hinduism is supposed to have come late
to Bengal and to have given way to many heterodox forms of
Buddhism and later Tantrism (cf. Chatterji 2003). In the Positive back¬
ground to Indian sociology (1937), Sarkar says that when scholars
talk about 'the expansion of Hindu culture, [this] implies nothing but
the democratization or rather the impact of the masses upon the
main stock of Hindu institutions and ideas’ (Sarkar 1937: 472, italics
in the original).6 This is said while discussing the impact of Bengal
Vaishnavism on folk culture. In other contexts, as we have just seen,
Bengal is given an autonomous status with a separate religion, ‘Ben-
galicism’, an independent Indo-Aryan language, and an indigenous
rationality distinct from those of other regions in India.7 However,

6 ‘Hindu is often collapsed with 'Indian' and is used as a marker for differen¬
tiating Indian from non-Indian culture and civilisation (see Flora n.d.).
Sarkar’s collaborator, Haridas Palit, who documented folk rituals in Malda,
puts forward the view that Bengali had a different origin and therefore a distinct
identity.
 THE NATIONALIST SOCIOLOGY OF BENOY KUMAR SARKAR 121

it is not as if Bengal occupies an exclusive place in Sarkar’s writings.

Thus, while discussing the Muslim conquest of India, he says that it
must be compared with the periods in European history when Europe
was subjugated by the 'Saracens, the Mongols or Tartars and Ottoman
Turks’ (Sarkar 1937: 91), though even such processes of colonisation
throw up contradictions. Arab culture, personified in the figures of
Albaruni in the eleventh century and Abul Fazal in the sixteenth
century, becomes the medium by which Indian civilisation speaks
to Europe. Sarkar refers to Albaruni as a 'Muslim Indologist’ who
presents Hindu culture 'to his readers in the perspective of Greek
thought’(1937: 462):

This Moslem mathematician of Khiva [Albaruni] is an important

landmark and agent in the establishment of Greater India. His service
to charaiveti [march on], the dynamic march of Hindu culture is
immense. Not the least paradoxical feature in this evolution consists in
the fact that while his masters of the Ghazni House were laying the
foundations of a Moslem Raj in India his scientific and philosophical
researches in Hindu culture were contributing to the Hinduisation of
the Moslem world and through the Moslems to the world. (Sarkar 1937:
462) how to look @ history

World history, Sarkar says, can be thought of in terms of an inter¬

action between vishwa-shakti or'world forces’ and human will. These
world forces encompass the 'totality of man’s environment, natural
as well as man-made—the totality of social, economic, cultural, poli¬
tical, religious and sexual circumstances in which man is placed’
(Bandyopadhya 1984: 36).8 But, for Sarkar, even though man-made
forces also embody the 'laws of necessity’, they are simultaneously
the agents of historical change as they represent the will that is capable
of breaking the laws of necessity. History then becomes a strategic
resource in the struggle for political survival (Sarkar 1936). Historical
societies are nations, willed unities based on the consent of its
members. Not all nations become states, but the ones that do have
to base their sense of autonomy on territorial integrity sustained by
military force. The state could be thought of as an aggregate of groups
and associations bound together within a discrete territory that could

8 Ratzenhofer’s influence should be noted here.

122 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

be supported by external force and (national) culture.9 National cul¬

ture, for Sarkar, could be described in voluntaristic terms, as senti¬
ments, desires, and values, or as ‘systems of influences, conversion,
conquests and domination’ (Bhattacharyya 1990: 257). Thus,
association with a national culture gives rise to human creativity
born from the desire and the power to influence and dominate. But
for Sarkar this creativity is also directed inward—to the democratic
spirit innate within Indian society that surfaces not only in revolu¬
tionary movements but also in the different types of organisations
and associations delineated in the political treatises of the ancient
period, giving proof that ‘Hindus’ have always had the capacity for
self-governance. In this context, the India that Sarkar refers to is
exclusively Hindu. He says that due to the fact that ‘during the white
man’s burthen Hindus were deprived of chances for displaying ag¬
gressive secularism ... [a] general skepticism has grown among Eur-
American scholars as to the capacity of Hindus for organized
activities and institutions’ (Bhattacharyya 1990: 257).10
Why does Sarkar sometimes speak of India as being exclusively
Hindu, while at other times including Islam and the Muslim period
of Indian history as being part of the Indian civilisational process?
He believed that history itself is a process of‘creative disequilibrium'
in which frontiers are constantly being renegotiated (see Flora 1994).
But he also believed that boundaries are experiential entities in the
cultures of nations. At various times in India’s history, Islam could
be thought of as part of Indian experience, that is, when Indian civil¬
isation was in its expansive or dominant phase, while at other times
it was not, as was the case under British rule. In this, India was no
different from any other society and partook of the same universal
processes that were delineated by scholars like Gumplowicz and
Ratzenhofer. However, Sarkar also gives his own particular twist to
this theory.

9 I am not clear about what'nation' means in Sarkar’s writings. Sometimes

he conjoins the term with the state, as in ‘the nation state’, at other limes he
uses it to mean genus or jati.
10 According to Flora (1994) such ‘irrationalities’ as dependence on alien
powers for political government were a consequence of‘international factors’—
the external dimension of vishwa-shakti.
 THE NATIONALIST SOCIOLOGY OF BENOY KUMAR SARKAR 123

The contradiction between various historical forces is not merely

intelligible in the long time span of the political historian; it is also
anthropomorphised in the figure of the exemplary individual. Thus,
in his writings, figures like Albaruni, Buddha, Vivekananda, and even
Churchill and Mussolini come to represent civilisational expansive¬
ness—but they also stand for the contradictions in their societies.
(This we have already seen with reference to Albaruni.) Sarkar also
has some interesting passages on the Second World War in The poli¬
tical philosophies since 1905 (1942), in which he discusses the moral
effect of Churchill’s speeches on the English people when they were
threatened with the possibility of defeat. He calls Churchill an
'inspired fanatic’—much like Hitler—whose charisma conquered
'British defeatism’. He also says that Churchill embodies in his per¬
sona both the forces of ‘democracy and despotocracy’, again like
Hitler and Mussolini. He calls ‘Churchillian democracy’ a despoto¬
cracy based on popular will, like the dictatorial regimes in Italy and
Germany.
The tension between vishwa-shakti and individual volition is also
expressed in the minutiae of day-to-day events and not merely in
the broad sweep of history. Thus, in a discussion on the Japanese
bombing of‘American, British and Dutch empires in Asia’ in 1941,
Sarkar says that with ‘the War at India’s door interhuman relations
is undergoing swift transformation (ibid.: 67). The transformation
arises, according to Sarkar, because of the exodus of residents from
metropolitan centres to villages (1942). He says that the threat of
war achieved a form of social metabolism in Bengal that generations
of social reformers could not. Thus, with the exodus from Calcutta
of‘domestic servants’ and women, ‘metropolitan residents are com¬
pelled to do cooking and cleaning’ (ibid.). In a characteristic shift
from the particular to the general, he also says that this situation of
enforced self-help has led to ‘the breakdown of distinctions between
superiors and inferiors’ and to the decentralisation of labour, capital,
skill, intelligence, modern conveniences and cultural institutions’
(ibid.: 70) .u

11 Much of Sarkars writing is in this style. Such utterances seem to be a

polemic with ideas that were either current at the time when Sarkar wrote or
that engaged his immediate attention. However, it is not as if the ideas he is
124 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

Sarkar considered war a kind of‘world force’, as did many of his

European interlocutors such as Haushofer (whom I have already
mentioned), and Gini, the sociologist/statistician whom Sarkar met
while visiting Italy in 1935-6. However, apart from these casual state¬
ments there is no serious reflection on war as such. Sarkar is far
more interested in the role that charismatic individuals could play
in bringing about ‘creative disequilibrium’. He speaks of‘world con¬
querors’ or avatars that carry ideologies from one people to another.
Only such exemplary individuals, he feels, bend the forces of history
to their will and become active agents of historical disequilibrium
rather than its passive victims. Such individuals serve as counter¬
balancing forces to the non-rational forces that the impersonal agents
of vishwa-shakti sometimes release (see fn. 10).
Sarkar is conscious of the tension between the rational and the
irrational in his writing of history, and between legitimate ideology
and pragmatic self-interest in the domain of politics. Even though
he calls himself an ideological dualist, it is not through the logic of
argument that this tension is articulated in his writing. Rather it is
represented anthropomorphically through the figure of the exemp¬
lary individual. Thus, not only are images of civilisational expansive¬
ness made accessible through figures like the Buddha, Chaitanya,
Christ, and Vivekananda, but so also are the contradictions between
ideologies and cultural practices. Sarkar gives them human form
and thereby allows for the naturalisation of the tension between con¬
tradictory historical forces.
Sarkar applies this formula to all his work. Thus, the disequilibrat-
ing effects of war are presented in terms of examples like ‘the flight
of domestic servants’ from Calcutta, giving war a human and very
mundane face. We see the same process at work in his discussion of

arguing against are clearly stated; rather, the reader is left to infer them from
details in the texts themselves. Thus, the immediate context of this curious
statement could well have been a response to Gandhi’s message of self-help
and moral improvement. Sarkar was ambivalent about Gandhi’s moral philo¬
sophy though he admired his qualities of leadership. He says that Gandhi was
a master politician in the mould of Kautilya and Machiavelli (see Sarkar 1939).
 THE NATIONALIST SOCIOLOGY OF BENOY KUMAR SARKAR 125

religion and politics. Gods and goddesses of Pauranic Hinduism are

considered by Sarkar mere projections of pragmatic human concerns
and the day-to-day morality of the folk. Politics is the interests of
the state anthropomorphised into the image of the nation state. This
is clearly articulated in Sarkar s responses to events during the Second
World War, such as the moral effect of Churchills speeches on the
English people when they were threatened with the possibility of
defeat. He says Churchill’s charisma conquered ‘British defeatism’
and calls him an embodiment of Upanishadic idealism and the Gita
cult of duty for duty’s sake . . .’ (Sarkar: 1942: 299). He argues that:
‘For Young England today Churchill is what Hitler was to Young
Germany in 1918-33 and continues [in 1942] to be—the avatar of
patriotism and the avatar of mysticism’ (ibid.: 300).
In spite of his almost obsessive concern with nationalism, Sarkar
was an agnostic when it came to the field of political ideology. Whilst,
in principle, he did want India to take the form of a democratic
state, he took a relativist position vis-a-vis the existing kinds of poli¬
tical regimes. Thus, he was quite willing to consider the possibility
that non-democratic state formations were legitimate in particular
historical situations such as those of war. In the second volume of
Political philosophies since 1905 (1942) Sarkar says that ideals such as
‘de-imperialisation’ and ‘de-colonisation’ have the same significance
for people living through the two world wars as democracy and
socialism had before, that is before the world wars. They‘furnish the
elan de la vie to millions of repressed humanity’ (Sarkar 1942: 282).
But such ideals are only vehicles for ‘inspired fanatics’ who are able
to reshape historical destiny by the force of their will.12
For Sarkar, all political movements have a similar telos—they
swing between the two poles of democracy and ‘despotocracy’. In
spite of the creative disequlibrium that he saw in world history,
political movements had a stable form which he designated ‘demo-
despotocracy’. ‘It is because of the eternal presence of despotocracy
in the human Gestalt that I consider demo-despotocracy to be the

12 Sarkar attributes the phrase‘inspired lanatic’ to Vivekananda (see Mukh-

opadhya 1944: 45).
126 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

normal, natural, fundamental and universal reality. . .’ (Sarkar 1942:

301). He goes on to say that, just as the dictatorial regimes in Germany
and Italy are based on popular will, so also is ‘Churchillian demo¬
cracy’ a despotocracy constitutionally legitimised by the wartime
government in Britain. Thus, both democracy and dictatorship are
responses to specific historical situations.
Specialists on Sarkar’s work like Bhattacharyya (1990) and Flora
(1994) tend to link this aspect of his work to Pareto’s sociology. Sarkar
himself comments on Pareto’s idea of cthe circulation of elites’ in
The positive background of Hindu sociology (1937), but finds it too
constraining as a philosophy of history. Also, he does not seem to
share Pareto’s cynicism regarding oligarchic tendencies within the
politics of the masses. For Sarkar, the democratic impulse is also a
powerful force in world history. Sarkar’s admiration for the ‘inspired
fanatic’, his desire for rapid social change in India as well as his
laudatory writings on the wartime regimes in Italy and Germany,
have led some Indian scholars to label him a closet fascist (see Bhatta¬
charyya 1990). Sarkar’s political ideas were formulated in a period
when India was going through political and social upheaval. He was
able to observe at first hand a wide range of political formations and
perhaps for that reason he took a relativist position vis-a-vis all of
them. After all, as a citizen of a subjugated nation he was aware of
the contradictions inherent in democracy that allowed nation states
to sustain democratic structures within their own territorial bound¬
aries while at the same time colonising other nations. Even though
Sarkar visited Italy and Germany several times between the two world
wars and had close contact with scholars who were associated with
the dictatorial regimes of those countries, he had no sympathy with
the racial and eugenicist theories that were being propagated there.
In fact, he was quite critical of Haushofer’s attempt to analyse
population in terms of concepts such as ‘race destiny’ and so on (see
Sarkar 1936).13 He said that racial ‘miscegenation’ was necessary for
cultural dynamism and it was pragmatic self-interest rather than

13 It is important to remember that Sarkar’s critical reflections were made

in a public forum—that is, in his presidential address to the first Indian Popu¬
lation Conference.
 THE NATIONALIST SOCIOLOGY OF BENOY KUMAR SARKAR 127

‘strength of soul’ that led to cultural expansion. He did not believe

that political boundaries ever coincided with racial or cultural
boundaries and was outspoken in his condemnation of those who
sought to represent Hinduism as a unique religion. He said there
was ‘no truth’ in Hinduism that was also not found in other religions
(Sarkar 1936, 1937, 1939).
The novelty of Sarkar’s perspective can best be understood by
comparing his ideas with those of his associate Radha Kumud
Mukherji (1989), the nationalist historian and fellow member of the
Dawn Society. For Mukherji, India’s territorial boundary coincides
with her cultural unity. To me it seems that this aspect of Sarkar’s
work is best understood in terms of the sociology of von Wiese and
his perspective on lebensfilosofie. The idea that the form of social life
could be understood as a structure of generality, distinct from its
particular spatio-temporal manifestations, as well as the emphasis
on individuality which found a place in the structure of generality
both as a value and as an embodiment of a certain kind of relation¬
ship, were attractive to Sarkar. Like von Wiese, he felt that sociology
had to account for the fact that individuals were both contained by
forms of sociation but could also confront them; they were both
within society as well as outside it. Gumplowicz and Ratzenhofer
are significant influences on his thought. Yet, even here, I do not
think Sarkar believed in the concept of a homogeneous ‘folk state’.
He did not think that the process of assimilation between different
groups was ever complete. All nation states had plural cultures and
it was the friction generated between them that contributed to a state
of creative disequilibrium.

IV. SARKAR'S SIGNATURE ON INDIAN

SOCIOLOGY

I began this essay by saying that B.K. Sarkar’s sociology was at best
a footnote in the history of Indian sociology. It is now time to review
that statement. Sarkar’s sociology was shaped by his nationalism,
more specifically by his membership of the Dawn Society and by his
participation in the Swadeshi movement. The term ‘sociology’ was
used by intellectuals associated with the movement to discuss issues
128 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

of Indian independence and self-government, especially within a

comparative historical perspective. The curriculum of the Dawn
Society and its successor, the National College of Education, saw
history both in terms of specific socio-political events as well as
intellectual currents that configured trajectories of human intention-
ality. To this end they felt it important to turn to the study of Indian
philosophy and to traditional social formations, but also to Western
philosophy and history.
Sarkar was introduced to these ideas through the Dawn Society
which, under the auspices of Satish Chandra Mukherjee, organised
classes on subjects as diverse as the Bhagvat Gita, the Indian village
tradition of swaraj, the philosophy of Kant and Hegel, and so on.
Sarkar thought that an exposure to the intellectual heritage of the
West was crucial in the shaping of the consciousness of Bengali youth.
To this end he devoted a considerable portion of his career to the
translation and review of the works of modern European social
scientists, thereby making their ideas available to a Bengali public.
This is probably his greatest contribution to the development of
sociology in Bengal. He also tried to give concrete form to the idea
of historical comparison by isolating socio-economic and political
factors that could be quantified, and established an objective standard
by which the development of various Asian and European societies
could be measured (Sarkar 1936). His concern for social reform led
him to foreground‘applied sociology’, which included concerns such
as poverty alleviation, public health, criminology, and the sociology
of population. These concerns, according to Flora (1994), are still
reflected in the way that sociology is taught in Calcutta University,
and perhaps it is in Bengal that Sarkar s work still has a living presence.
However, his concern with India’s modernity and the use of the
comparative method in this regard is possibly what gives a distinctive
formulation to Indian sociology as it is shared by sociologists across
generations, whether they belong to the ‘Calcutta School’ or come
from other sociological traditions—the one established by M.N.
Srinivas in Baroda and then in Delhi, for instance (see Chatterji 2000;
Shah 2000).
What relevance does Sarkar’s sociology have for us today? Socio ¬
logists like von Wiese, Gumplowicz, and Ratzenhofer, who were a
 THE NATIONALIST SOCIOLOGY OF BENOY KUMAR SARKAR 129

major influence on Sarkar, are no longer taught in sociology de¬

partments today even though they once exercised a considerable in¬
fluence when the discipline of sociology was still demarcating its
boundaries. Thus Albion Small, who helped found the Chicago
School of Sociology, was deeply influenced by Ratzenhofer and
Gumplowicz. Distinctions between sociology, social and political
philosophy, and social reform were not as clearly drawn as they are
now. The increasing professionalisation of the discipline has led to
an emphasis on autonomous methodological tools like intensive
fieldwork and survey techniques, as well as theoretical models that
prefer to seek explanations for social phenomena from within the
realm of social life itself rather than from the psychological or Indo-
logical. In the light of this it is evident that Sarkar’s work cannot
contribute to our understanding of mainstream Indian sociology.
However, if we think of the history of sociology and the way that
it is taught in various universities across India, we see that each
department still carries traces of the way in which sociology was ini¬
tially conceived by its founders. This may be through an interface
either with political philosophy (and the department in Calcutta
University still has teachers who have double roles as political
scientists and sociologists),14 or with social anthropology, as we see
in the department that Srinivas set up in Delhi University. It is in
this context that Sarkar becomes important. He wrote at a time when
the field was still fluid. However, Indian sociology is not a
homogeneous subject. It has many different streams that can best
be understood through the diverse pedagogic traditions institu¬
tionalised in the many sociology departments established across the
country. Sarkar’s is an important part not only in the history of Indian
sociology but also of the way that India herself is conceived by Indian
sociology. By rooting themselves in sociology, Indian scholars writing
in British India could stake a claim for India’s modernity. They used
sociology to oppose orientalist representations of India that were
put forward by Indologists. It is this legacy—that is, a concern with

14 Bolanath Bandyopadhyay, who wrote a dissertation on Sarkar as a student

of the political science department, is now on the faculty of the sociology de¬
partment (see Bandyopadhyay 1984).
130 ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST

India’s present rather than her past—that all sociologists of India,

whatever their methodological differences, share.

REFERENCES

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Barnes, Harry Elmer, ed. 1948.An introduction to the history of sociology. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
-. 1968. Gumplowicz, Ludwig. In D.L. Sills, ed., International encyclopedia
of social sciences, vol. 6, pp. 293- 5. Chicago: The Macmillan Company 8c
The Free Press.
Bhattacharyya, Swapan Kumar. 1990. Indian sociology The role of Binoy Kumar
Sarkar. Burdwan: The University of Burdwan Press.
Coomaraswamy, Ananda K. 1981 [1909]. Essay in national idealism. Delhi:
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Chatterji, Roma. 2000. An Indian sociology? What kind of object is it? (Paper
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-. 2003. Category of folk. In Veena Das, ed., Oxford India companion to
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 Sociological Bulletin
62 (1), January - April 2013, pp. 4-22
© Indian Sociological Society

Benoy Kumar Sarkar (1887-1949):

A Tryst with Destiny

Su h rita Sa h a

Benoy Kumar Sarkar's empathisers would be delighted to know that,

far from being relegated to oblivion, his name is very much footed in
the list of early founders of sociology in India, and this essay bears
witness to it. This essay begins with a brief biographical sketch of
Sarkar and highlights the socio-temporal and intellectual context in
which his contributions became meaningful. Sarkar was essentially a
sociologist of problems, and based on his axial concerns and
analytical point of departure, this essay discusses his (a) concept of
sociology and methodological contribution, (b) ideas of personality,
society, and social progress, (c) long-time concern with Indian
tradition and a comparative study of the East and the West, and (d)
understanding of social reconstruction in India.

[Keywords: Bengal; the East and the West'; Indian tradition; Benoy
Kumar Sarkar; social reconstruction]

A commentator on Benoy Kumar Sarkar had once lamented:

Professor Benoy Kumar Sarkar is a name very few among us today much
care for. This versatile scholar and prolific writer who for forty-two yea
of his life wrote and lectured to develop what was known in his own tim
as 'Sarkarism', which was essentially an attempt to endow Indian soc
science with a new method and content, has been denied his due place in
the history of our social and political thought. His writings which run t
about thirty thousand printed pages are not available in print. Even in t
recent craze of bringing out the old classic in printed form no one - not
speak of Government, ICSSR [Indian Council of Social Science Researc
or any other suitable organization - has come forward to reprint the weal
of ideas Professor Sarkar has left for us. None of his books is read as a tex
in any of the universities of India. Even Calcutta University whic
happened to be his alma mater and where he taught for a long time has
ousted him from its class rooms where there seems to be no end to the
galore of foreign ideas. Benoy Sarkar is only remembered by a small group

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 Benoy Kumar Sarkar (1887-1949) 5
of his close associates and disciples - some of
while some others are scattered in different pro
nor the proper organizational facilities to revive
(A.K. Mukhopadhyay 1979: 212).

Benoy Kumar Sarkar was born on 26 Dec

district of undivided Bengal. At the age of th
Entrance Examination of Calcutta Universi
College in 1901, where he studied till 1906. In
First in the BA Examination of Calcutta Univ
in English and History and was awarded the I
he took his MA degree in English and, just
formal degree, he was offered the State Scho
of India as well as the post of a Deputy Magis
these offers. The year 1905 was also the year
was launched in Bengal and the movement had
on the young scholars. Sarkar could not come
either receiving an award from or directly se
He soon joined the Swadeshi Movement and ch
of activities. From 1906 to 1914, he was ac
National Education Movement of Bengal
Education of Jadavpur. During this period, he
schools at Maldah, wrote five books in Ben
guidelines for national education, and campaig
cular as the medium of instruction in vari
India (ibid. : 213; Bhattacharya 1990: 21, 30). Y
influenced by Satish Chandra Mukheijee, th
(a meeting ground for the intellectuals of Ben
but Vivekananda's worldview had a much d
Mukhopadhyay et al. 2003: 14; Chatteiji 200
The second phase of Sarkar's eventful life
undertook his first world tour. The tour lasted till 1925 and Sarkar
lectured in different parts of the world including China, Egypt, England,
France, Germany, Japan, Korea, Manchuria, Italy, and the United States
of America. With his command over English, French, German, and
Italian, and due to his encyclopaedic knowledge in various branches of
social sciences including economics, history, politics, sociology, and
even literature, Sarkar established his right to be heard by an inter
national audience. For the first time, India was placed in a comparative
culture-study in the diverse perspectives of the world along with those of
the Anglo-Americans (Bhattacharya 1990: 58). Gradually, the central
theme of his lectures became the East-West unity based on a qualitative

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 6 Suhriía Saha

parity betwee
Sarkar's Futuri
Sarkar return
the Departmen
promoted to th
held till 1949.
there till 1931.
the Internation
of its Econom
alone ran to ab
his publication
number (S.K. M
Sarkar was no
initiating a cou
could build up
ideas would be
effort, he fo
important bei
Samaj Vijnan
various subject
Economics in
On 28 Februa
Sarkar again lef
of America. H
different parts
Harvard. The g
India in Worl
charya 1990: 1
previous tours,
However, befor
on 27 October
Washington, w
him in the ear
when his wife
daughters, he r
still to do' (Lett
1990: 134).

Concept of Sociology and Methodological Contributions

The term 'sociology' was unknown until 1842 when Auguste Comte first
used it in the fourth volume of his Cours de Philosophie Positive. Before

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 Benoy Kumar Sarkar (1887-1949) 7

that the terminology used by Comte was 'P

physics'. Gradually, sociology became a popula
Unfortunately, however, according to Sarkar
recognised boundary and there were as ma
sociology as there were sociologists. Sarkar
pluralistic world that we witness in the doma
(1936: 3).
Sarkar found it difficult to align himself with the sociological system
of Comte, Spencer, Durkheim, Tonnies, Marx, or any other western
sociologist, because they invariably emphasised on this or that aspect of
the social existence of human beings. Sarkar was very critical of any
kind of monistic interpretation of social phenomenon. Comte in his
Cours de Philosophie Positive wrote that three large 'mental stages'
characterise the 'functional' evolution of mankind: the first is the 'theo
logical stage', characterised by fetishism, polytheism, and monotheism;
the second is the 'metaphysical' stage; and the third is the 'positive'
stage, which marks the age of speciality and generality. While 'imagi
nation' is supposed to be the characteristic of the theological stage,
'speculation' represents the metaphysical stage and 'experience' marks
the positivist stage. In Comte's judgement, humanity has been marching
towards the ultimate stage in which positive knowledge or scientific
experience is supreme. Comte attaches more value to the positive stage
'positive' vis-à-vis the theological and the metaphysical states. He
simply associates scholarly brains, exact knowledge, experience, experi
ment, generalisation, specialisation and science as an antithesis of
religion or philosophy (Comte 1974). This kind of value-oriented
unilinear evolutionary model was unacceptable to Sarkar.
Sarkar argued that it is not possible to demonstrate any stage in
which reason rules to the exclusion of imagination or experience,
imagination to the exclusion of experience or reason, and experience to
the exclusion of the other two. Nor is it demonstrable anthropologically
or even psychologically that imagination belongs to the primitive mind
and precedes concrete experience which is the sole prerogative of
modem mind (Sarkar 1937b/1985: 11). This kind of positivist deter
minism by Comte is as fallacious as the economic determinism or
reductionism found in Karl Marx's theory of political economy. In fact,
Sarkar has written, 'it should be observed at once that the only liaison of
the Positive Background of Hindu Sociology with Comte's Philosophie
Positive lies in the value he attaches to the category "positive"' (ibid.:
11).
In 1887, Fredinand Tonnies published his Gemeinschaft und Gesell
schaft (Community and Association) (Tonnies 1974). In it he put forward

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8 Suhrita Saha

a theory that a
forces, inevitab
from the 'natu
contrast, those
or serve some
natural, while
artificial ceme
community; w
atmosphere is
distinction bet
of Sarkar's Vi
accept Tonnie
analytical purp
continuities an
(Baneijee 1979
Emile Durkhe
Sarkar in Villa
professional g
also used the
and srenis (co
1990: 213-14)
views on the
dismissed indiv
instance, both
facts' and soci
acting, fixed o
constraint; or
given society,
pendent of it
Sarkar was cri
determination
created a kind
Max Weber wa
represented a
sociology. We
historians like
towards social
into sociology
Verstehen (Sar
on the relatio
Weber's viewp
one-sided and

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Benoy Kumar Sarkar (1887-1949) 9

(Bhattacharya 1990: 233). Excepting Weber's

however, Sarkar appreciated his work on s
authority (ibid. : 240).
Sarkar defined sociology as the study of any
that may be described as social or that has bea
(Sarkar 1936: 8). In his scheme for the Beng
Sarkar divided the subject into two board categ

A. Theoretical Sociology:

1. Institutional sociology (family, property, state,

(a) Anthropology, history and sociography
(b) Social philosophy and philosophical history

2. Psychological sociology, sociology

(a) Social Psychology
(b) Social process and social forms

B. Applied Sociology:

Study of man, societal planning, transformation o

'Social metabolism' along diverse fronts (Sarkar 1

In the early 1920s, Sarkar pointed out that th

purely objective methodology with realistic an
to the facts and phenomena of the phy
(Bhattacharya 1990: 198). His commitment to
social sciences is clear from the following excer

In order to achieve this viewpoint the prelimina

acquire altogether new angles of vision, and this
good few of the scholars got interested in studi
have absolutely no Indian bearing. In other word
the historical, philosophical, economic and politi
spirit in which the archaeologist or rather the st
have been attacking their problems (Sarkar 1922

Sarkar further opined that, while a social scie

great variety of facts and phenomena, the ulti
systematise and methodise the results of these
and find out the unity in the diversity and th
lying the varied instances (Sarkar 1913: 81-82).
method of ascending from the individual to the
the common, one shall advance from simple to

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10 Suhrita Saha

concrete facts t
was in full prais
of the difficultie
the human scien
understanding
comparisons shou
and the items
denominator. Un
the conditions o
statistics, could
Another distinc
pluralism in the
reactions, inter
(Sarkar 1941: 25
could not be off
'plurality of ca
proved. As a m
operation of mu
Sarkar, while m
which leads to
philosophical the

Personality, Soc

Sarkar believed
theories which t
region, climate,
everywhere and
This unity of hu
human being. Hu
since ancient tim
fire, energy, a
energetic cult of
social obscuran
creative personal
addressed the
Ramkrishna Cen

Man as an individ
transform the gi
Society, into the
region or geograp

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Benoy Kumar Sarkar (1887-1949) 11
the human will, man's energy, that recreates the
forces, humanizes the earth and spiritualises the g
is not the group, the clan, the nation or the society
individual to submit to the social milieu, the gro
and the status quo. It is rather the individual per
moves to change and the milieu to break, that su
forms tradition (Sarkar 1939c: 352).

Humanhood, according to Sarkar, consists of

creativity. Human personality is essentially a d
on and on, and by nature it is a differentiating o
itself the mechanism of a transformer and re-cr
Since the individual contains within herself/h
transformer, s/he can also doubt everything an
order. This is what Sarkar called 'the spirit o
1984: 13). In his presidential address at the annu
Hindu Hostel on 29 September 1926, Sarkar el
the naughty:

The naughty differs from the goody, the trad

standpoint that while the latter looks upon the pre
ideally best conceivable and is ever ready to find j
happening in it, the former believes that there m
better than what he has today, and that huma
higher than what they find themselves. The naugh
doubt, with a question, with a challenge (Sarkar 1

The individual, as portrayed by Sarkar, is,

dominated by her/his environment. S/he can e
determine, and even change her/his circumstan
departs from Durkheim's 'over-socieatisat
economic determination of history (Sarkar 1941
not perpetually at the mercy of the econom
assert. Instead, the human can control, com
transcend economic forces. Similarly, contrary
individuals cannot be invariably dominated by t
gets shaped, re-shaped and transformed by
mutual determinism between the two. As again
Sarkar felt more at home with Immanuel Kant'
- a category which claims independent status fo
and initiative (Baneijee 1984: 14).
An individual carries with her/him a dual
personality. S/he is neither wholly good, nor w

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12 SuhritaSaha

s/he is reasonab
s/he is irratio
typologies of h
not appear to
development of
to the positive
modern peopl
Tonnies' differe
(Artificial Wi
association or so
(1942: 1-3). The
him, is that the
exclusion of o
understood in
rational, logica
intuitive. Huma
is a function of

Man is generally
should be untrue
logical in man h
in himself out
features of his p
as his physical f
powerful than t

Man is the cen

social instituti
classes, races, t
dissociative soc
general conclus
are not inheren
competitive and

The inter-hum
attachment, con
rivalry, jealous
processes that co
Even the collec
capable of merc

This plural cha

Vilfredo Pareto
between the De

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 Benoy Kumar Sarkar (1887-1949) 13
the eternal make-up of the mental and moral perso
irrational is no less constructive than that of r
The human being, according to Sarkar, 'is perfect
improvement but not capable of perfection' (1
plural character of human personality makes it p
being to overcome all hazards of life. It is the ete
beings to struggle against adversities of life -
(darkness, death), avidya (ignorance), etc. -
(reality), jyoti (light), amrita (immortality), a
Human beings cannot simply avoid this struggle i
truly human (ibid. : 498).
While Sarkar rejected the exclusively monist
explanation of human behaviour, he nevertheless
sality of human being's urge to live and flourish. I
basic urge, the human being is also endowed with
These are Kama, the sex instinct; Kanchana, which stands for
professional, acquisitive, or proprietary instincts; Kirti, the instict for
power, conquest, and domination; and Karma, the creational or creative
instinct. The four instincts, ambitions, urges, or drives, wrote Sarkar,

Lead to four different spheres of creation. These spheres of creation

constitute culture in the most generic sense... 'Kama' leads to family (and
society or social organization). The results of 'Kanchana' instinct are
economic (as well as social) activities and institutions. The state, law,
politics, society and allied forms and relations of human life and derived
from the 'Kirti' urges. And the instinct of 'Karma ' is responsible for the
arts and crafts... etc., items that generally go by the name of culture (ibid.:
80-81).

Eveiy human attitude or behaviour is the result of conjoint working

of more than one of the above four instincts, though each one of them
may not invariably and to the same intensity be present in each and every
case. Each instinct leads to a related set of ideas, ideals, institutions, and
activities of human beings (ibid.: 82).
Society, according to Sarkar, is the arena where the two processes of
co-operation and conflict are constantly in operation. Relations between
individuals, groups, associations, or any other unit of society are marked
by both the associative and the dis-associative social processes. Conflict
occupies an important position in Sarkar's understanding of social
reality. Looking at conflict from a philosophical standpoint, Sarkar
viewed conflict as the most creative agency in society. There is no social
progress without conflict. In Sarkar's conception, progress is indefinite
and indeterminate in the sense that there is nothing like the ultimate goal

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 14 Suhrita Saha

of progress. Sar
posit social chan
good as the fin
Sarkar did not e
of society. Soc
change. It is a c
not speak of any
Sarkar develop
comprehensive,
which, based up
logy, projects i
evil complexes w
totally overcom
creative diseq
disequilibrium c
the time. It is th
motion that co
disequilibrium w
Not-Al — (2) A
Here 'A' repre
However, they d
'C'. They simply
substance and
necessitate any
infinitum. Prog
523).
Sarkar further clarified,

Progress consists in the fact that at every stage there is a deliberate and
conscious conflict between what for the time being is supposed to be good
and what is supposed to be bad and that it is a result of this conflict that the
next stage make its appearance. There is the play of the creative
intelligence and will of man at every stage (ibid. : 525).

Progress is, therefore, a relative phenomenon which is different for

different regions and is determined by the objective conditions and
subjective capability of the people concerned.

Interpretation of the Indian Tradition and a Comparative Study of

the East and the West

In 1910, Sarkar was entrusted with the task of translating into English a
Sanskrit work on politics, economics, and sociology, namely, Sukra

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Benoy Kumar Sarkar (1887-1949) 15

charya's Nivisara, for the Sacred Books of

himself for the Panini Office, Allahabad.
mental change in Sarkar and he emerged as
secular, mundane, and materialistic worldvi
light the rich repertoire of secular and mu
ancient Hindus and this discovery shaped Sa
political ideas in the years to come (Chatt
that much of the prevalent notions regardin
Hindu genius in grappling with the problem
the extra-proneness of the Indian min
impractical speculation can vanish and it ca
of mal-observation and non-observation
comparative method can be applied when
phenomena. The achievements of the w
technology, industrialisation, and so forth a
less a century old. So while instituting a co
Occidental cultures on the score of mater
into consideration the triumphs and d
generations, the Hindu scientific intellect a
be found to have been more or less simi
1937b/1985: 4-5). Sarkar goes on to add t
otherworldly aspects of Hindu life and thou
of. It was believed that Hindu civilisation
and non-political, if not pre-economic an
interpretation is utterly simplistic and bias
Hindus, no doubt, often placed the transcen
life, but they did not ignore or forget the
material. In fact, Hindu literature, fine art
economy, etc., have all sought to realise
between the eternal antipodes: the worldly
Through the study of Sukraniti, Sarkar cam
positivism, the place of earthly things like
the Hindu scheme of human existence (ibi
thus marked an important paradigm shi
development (Baneijee 1984: 9).
Sarkar wrote a monumental introducti
which was published in four volumes under
Background of Hindu Sociology in 1914, 1
volumes, and in his subsequent works, Sar
thesis, influenced by the Orientalists and In
that there was a fundamental and qualitat
institutions and ideals of the East and th

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 16 Suhrita Saha

posited that hum

same types on in
the West.
The historical d
sided Indologist
Midler, in his
establish that
unpractical my
10). Senart wro
unhistorically re
to the idea of th
same book, Senar
rolled away since
reason for modi
'the Hindu spir
guardian of tra
materialistic pro
Sarkar showed
essays on the re
Indological bias
secular activities
Buddhists have b
pursuits and in
salvation (Sark
American schola
fallacious sociol
which the postu
Occident is the f
Sarkar asserted
ground of Hind
one-sided and mo
or cosmopolitan
development. Th
peculiar to the
thoroughly 'hum
Sarkar (1937b/1
Indologists was
overlooked, or f
secular institut
logy was pron
medieval conditions of India with those of the modern and even
contemporary Euro-America. And, finally, it neglected the distinction

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Benoy Kumar Sarkar (1887-1949) 17

between institutions and ideas, that is, factual

wishes' (ibid. : 21).
Sarkar corrected the above mistakes in com
First, he exhibited the institutional and ideolo
from the positive, objective, humanistic, and
introduced comparison with western condition
care to point out (a) it was against the ancient
that the ancients and medieval of the East w
the institutions were not to be mixed up or com
for Asia or for Europe. Realpolitik was to be c
idealism with idealism. Some method of histor
to the data of the Orient and the Occident was
Sarkar thus arrived at a fundamentally differ
way of life. The Hindu, asserted Sarkar, had n
the economic, political, or other secular aspe
Hindu achievements in these fields could we
those of the West down to the period of Indust
century. It was only after the brilliant s
Revolution that the West went too far ahe
according to Sarkar, that was a temporary setb
all the potential for material advancement and,
catching up with the West (Baneijee 1984: 11).

The Hindu has no doubt always placed the

foreground of his life's scheme, but the Positiv
forgotten or ignored. Rather it is in and through
and the material that transcendental, the spiritu
have been allowed to display themselves in India
literature, fine arts, religious consciousness
organization, education system, social economy,
have sought to realise this synthesis and harm
antithesis and polarities of the Universe: the worl
the positive and transcendental, the many and th
Culture and Faith, Science and Religion, Cast
oneness, Image worship and the realization o
(quoted in Banerjee 1984: 11-12).

Thus, Sarkar's fundamental thesis based o

diverse social systems establishes the fundame
Humanity is the same all over the world. Sa
social theories which differentiate between hu
race, region, climate, or religion. Such theorie
take note of the fact that human beings ar

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 18 Suhrita Saha

faculties of min
of men and w
longitudes. The
genius, and the
poles apart. Diff

Social Reconstruction in India

The whole of Sarkar's sociology was directed to pointing out the road to
India's social and economic progress. Historically, it was true that India
lagged far behind the West in terms of modern industrialisation. But that,
according to Sarkar, was due to lack of proper guidance and initiative.
He was convinced of the universal operation of the law of progress and
visualised that:

Whatever happened in the economic sphere in Euro-America during the

past half century is bound also to happen in more or less on similar and
identical lines in Asia, and of course in India during the next two
generation or so. The problem before applied sociology and economic
statesmanship, so far India is concerned, consists in envisaging and hasten
ing the working out of the next stages in technical progress as well as
socio-economic and socio-political life (Sarkarl939c: 37).

The 'next stage' or the immediate goal for India was, according to
Sarkar, a capitalist society. Sarkar stressed on the need for establishing
banks in India for the growth of capital and investment, introduction of
private property in land, heavy industry, and economic legislation along
the Euro-American lines. Correct steps for national economic reconstruc
tion were to him important foundations of physical, moral, political and
spiritual development of India. The measures advocated by Sarkar were
often in contradiction with the prevailing nationalist ideology of his
times. But, he went on championing the cause of large-scale industriali
sation, mechanisation of agriculture, and increase in trade and commerce
for India's economic salvation (Sarkar 1932: 259).
Sarkar came out with elaborate guidelines and suggestions with
respect to educational reform, economic planning, and national welfare.
An idea of the educational reforms as embodied in Sarkar's Siksa-Vinjan
Series (in Bengali) can be obtained from his Siksanusasana (Educational
Creed), 1910 is given below:

A. General
i. Aim and criterion of education twofold: the pupil must grow up
intellectually and morally.

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 Benoy Kumar Sarkar (1887-1949) 19
ii. Moral training to be imparted not through l
and religious textbooks, but through arrang
student is actually made to develop habit
devotion to the interests of others.
iii. To build up character and determine the aim
iv. Educational institutions and movements mu
political, industrial or religious propagandas,
governed by the Science of Education b
grounds of sociology.

B. Tutorial
i. Even the most elementary course must have a multiplicity of
subject with due interrelation and coordination.
ii. The mother-tongue must be medium of instruction in all subject and
through all standards.
iii. Inductive method of proceeding from the known to the unknown,
concrete to the abstract, is to be the tutorial method in all branches
of learning.
iv. Two foreign languages besides English and at least two provincial
vernaculars must be made compulsory for all higher learning.

C. Organisational
i. Examinations must be held daily and on the basis of credit system.
ii. The day's routine must provide opportunities for recreations, excur
sions etc. along with pure intellectual work. There should be no
long holidays or periodical vacations except when necessitated by
pedagogic interests (Sarkar 1937b/1985: Preface: 4-6).

In 1924, Sarkar issued a Comprehensive Scheme of Economic

Development for Young India which was published extensively in many
of the dailies, weeklies and monthlies of India during 1925. The main
provisions of this 'economic planning', all-embracing as it is , are as
follows:

A. Fundamental Considerations
i. Indian poverty is in reality unemployment on a large scale.
ii. Industrialism is a cure to poverty in so far as it can generate
employment in diverse fields.
iii. Foreign capital is to be accepted mainly in case of large schemes of
industrialization.
iv. At present Indian capital should not be considered adequate for
anything but modest enterprises only.

B. The Programme: Economic Enterprise, Class by Class

i. Peasants

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20 Suhrita Saha

a. Larger holdi
b. New employm
c. Cooperative s
d. Combines of Sale.
ii. Artisans
a. Improved appliances to be introduced.
b. Specialised training to be imparted.
c. Banks to support handicrafts and cottage industries.
iii. Retail Traders
a. Training for petty merchants.
b. Banks to support shopkeepers.
iv. Industrial workers
a. Trade Unions to be promoted
b. Right to strike and other demands to be conceded when
necessary.
c. Co-operative stores for workers selling goods at low price,
v. Landowners of Richer Categories
a. Large scale farming to be undertaken.
b. Modern industries to be started.
c. Export-import business to be organized.
d. Insurance companies to be established.
vi. Exporters and importers
a. Banks for foreign trade to be created.
b. Overseas insurance to be started.
c. Commercial News Bureaus to be organized.
d. Foreign language and commercial geography training to be
given.
e. Indian commercial agencies to be established in foreign
countries.
vii. Moneyed Class
a. Modern industries to be started by these classes.
b. Banks and Insurance companies to be opened by them.
c. Participation in export-import.
d. Legislation against usury, a social necessity.
viii. Intellectuals
a. New professions to be sought for members of the intelligentsia
as technical or other assistant and directors in the new industries
and trade.
b. Existing government services to be Indianised.
c. Cooperative stores and housing societies for them.
d. Handicrafts and trade schools for children of the intellectual
class.
e. Pioneers of economic development to be trained for every
district by sending competent scholars to foreign countries
(ibid. : 25-27).]]]

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 Benoy Kumar Sarkar (1887-1949) 21

Sarkar thus had an almost encyclopae

reconstruction in India. In retrospect, we can
reformative ideas 'took off well, others di
ambition was to search for India's identity in
to fulfil this mission, he suggested ways and m
development, with intensive research, rigour, a

In Lieu of a Conclusion

Sarkar's work, more commonly known as 'Sarkarism', meant for his

followers, admirers, as well as his critics an unorthodox approach to the
social, economic, political, and cultural problems of India. Sarkar was, at
the same time, an original thinker, a prolific writer, and a nationalist with
an international outlook. Sarkar's outlook is essentially rational, materia
listic, realistic, historical, and scientific and he sincerely wished Indian
life and society to develop and flourish on these lines. One may not
always appreciate Sarkar's ideas, For example, his theory of extreme
relativism and pluralism or his perspective of unity of mankind and
uniformity of ideas and institutions of humanity, may easily come under
serious criticism. Moreover, in spite of his encyclopaedic range of
interest and volumes of writings, Sarkar failed to build a systematic
theory or even a conceptual framework. However, the fact remains that,
while some may appreciate Sarkar's work and some may not, no one can
ignore Sarkar's universal mission of the search for an Indian sociology.

References

Banerjee, B. 1979. 'The sociological thinking of Benoy Kumar Sarkar', Socialist

perspective, 6 (4): 223-38.
. 1984. The political ideas of Benoy Kumar Sarkar. Calcutta. K.P. Bagchi and Co.
Bhattacharya, S.K. 1990. Indian sociology: The role of Benoy Kumar Sarkar. Burdwan:
The University of Burdwan.
Chatteiji, R. 2007. 'The nationalist sociology of Benoy Kumar Sarkar', in P. Uberoi, N.
Sundar and S. Deshpande (eds.): Anthropology in the east: Founders of Indian
sociology and anthropology (106-31). Ranikhet: Permanent Black.
Comte, Auguste. 1974. The positive philosophy. New York: AMS Press.
Durkheim, Emile. 1966. The rules of sociological method. New York: Free Press.
Tonnies, Ferdinand. 1974. Community and association. London: Routledge and Keegan
Paul.
Mukhopadhyay, A.K. 1979. 'Benoy Kumar Sarkar: The theoretical foundation of Indian
capitalism', in A.K. Mukhopadhyay (ed.): The Bengali intellectual tradition: From
Rammohan Ray to Dhirendranath Sen (212-34). Calcutta : K.P. Bagchi and Co.
Mukhopadhyay, H. et al. 2003. Benoy Sarkar-er baithake (Conversation with Benoy
Sarkar, in Bengali) (2 volumes). Calcutta: Dey's Publishing.
Nagla, B.K. 2008. Indian sociological thought. Jaipur: Rawat Books.

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 22 Suhrita Saha

Sarkar, Benoy Kum

Chatteijee and Co.
. 1913. Introducti
Siksha Viganer Bh
. 1914. Aitihasik
Sahitya Parishad.
. 1922. Futurism o
and the West. Berl
. 1932. Naya Bang
(Vol. II). Calcutta:
. 1936. The sociolo
living and progres
and Co.
. 1937a. Creative I
Lahore: Motilal Banrasidass.
. 1937b/1985. The positive background of Hindu sociology. Delhi: Motilal
Banarasidas.
. 1938. Greetings of young India: Messages of social and cultural reconstruction
(Part I). Calcutta: N.M. Chowdhury and Co.
. 1939a. 'Demo-despotocracy and freedom', The Calcutta review, January: 247-66.
——. 1939b. The sociology of races, cultures and human progress: Studies in the
relation between Asia and Euro-America. Calcutta Chukerverty and Co. Ltd.
. 1939c. 'The equation of comparative industrialism and culture history', in B. Dass
(ed.): The social and economic ideas of Benoy Sarkar (28—42). Calcutta
Chukervertty Chatteijee and Co. Ltd.
. 1941. Villages and towns and social patterns. Calcutta: Chuckerverty Chatteijee
and Co. Ltd.

. 1942. The political philosophies since 1905 (Vol. II, Part III). Lahore: Motilal
Banarasidas.
. 1949. Dominion India in world perspectives: Economic and political. Calcutta:
Chukervertty Chatteijee and Co. Ltd.

Su h rita Sa h a, Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology, Presidency University,

Kolkata-700073
Email: suhritasaha@,email.com

[The final revised version of this paper was received on 22 November 2012
- Managing Editor]

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 South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 2015
Vol. 38, No. 4, 639 655, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2015.1078948

At the Fuzzy Edges of Fascism: Framing the Volk in India

BENJAMIN ZACHARIAH, Karl Jaspers Centre for Advanced Transcultural Studies,

Heidelberg University, Heidelberg, Germany

The genealogies of v€ olkisch ideas everywhere would suggest that they were relatively
widespread in a world thinking about defining the nature of nationalism. The idea of the Volk
has its origins, of course, in German romanticist imaginings of the German nation. The
glorification of an ‘Aryan’ past in India, the identification of the ‘folk element’, or a
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connection with sacred soil and sacred space, shared the same building blocks of romantic
nationalism that were evident across the world. This essay focuses on Indian v€ olkisch
nationalism through the work and career of Benoy Kumar Sarkar, his engagements with
German and Indian ideas, his ability to translate them across their specific contexts and his
institutional linkages.
Keywords: Volk; fascism; Nazism; Benoy Kumar Sarkar; Greater India Society; Ramakrishna
Mission; theosophy; Deutsche Akademie; Aryan; Hindu

Introduction
Given the prevalence of Right-wing movements that look very like fascist movements in India
(which includes the parts of the former British India and the former Princely States that are no
longer parts of India) from the early twentieth century to the present day, it seems important,
even obvious, to bring India into the analysis of v€ olkisch and fascist ideas and movements.
Yet, if fascism as an academic field of study can (or thinks it can) do without India, it is more
than apparent that by now, both politically and academically, India cannot do without fascism.
And if fascism cannot do without the v€ olkisch, this is true in both India and elsewhere in the
world. What is required, in the absence of a proper debate on fascism, the Volk and the
question of the authentic national voice in the historiography of South Asia, is to listen in on a
mostly Eurocentric debate and to restore South Asia’s rightful place in the history of Right-
wing movements. Given too that the age of the rise of fascism was also an age of
internationalism, which was the context for a movement or set of movements that disavowed
its or their own internationalist parochialism(s), it is only logical to reiterate here that there
was not a separate ‘European’ and ‘South Asian’ political sphere of debates: they were
inexorably connected.1
The point of this essay is not to set up a teleology of fascism in general or for South Asia.
Indeed, the genealogies of v€ olkisch ideas everywhere would suggest that some v€ olkisch ideas

Thanks are due to two anonymous referees who engaged closely with this piece, and to several persons who have
discussed fascism and fascists with me over the years, some of whom would not like to be implicated in my
conclusions, but you know who you are, and I have thanked you before.
1
See Ali Raza, Franziska Roy and Benjamin Zachariah, ‘Introduction: The Internationalism of the Moment—
South Asia and the Contours of the Interwar World’, in Ali Raza, Franziska Roy and Benjamin Zachariah (eds),
The Internationalist Moment: South Asia, Worlds and World Views, 1917 1939 (New Delhi: Sage, 2015),
pp. xi xli.

Ó 2015 South Asian Studies Association of Australia

 640 South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies

led nowhere, or at least not to fascism, but they were relatively widespread in a world thinking
about defining the nature of nationalism (and we now agree at least that fascism is a form of
nationalism).2 The idea of the Volk has its origins, of course, in romanticist imaginings of the
German nation in an era of European nationalisms. It was anti-rationalist, ethnic, racialised,
anti-Semitic and organicist and it glorified all things it could claim as ‘Germanic’; the extent
of its commitment to paganism, or to religion at all, remains open to debate and depends on
variations and emphases among its followers.3 This glorification of an ‘Aryan’ past in India,
or a connection with sacred soil and sacred space, hardly needed a (later) Nazi affiliation, but
it had been a part of the same building blocks of romantic nationalism across the world. A
Savarkarian Hindutva or a Sarkarian Volk would unproblematically have shared certain
distinctions with one another, as with the protagonists of a Germanic Volk.4 As for the
authentic Hindu or Aryan past, present and future, groups like the Arya Samaj, social
reformers and anti-Muslim campaigners, the Ramakrishna Mission, or the Theosophists and
their splinter groups, competed with one another for the right to define this, but did not
substantially disagree that there was one.5
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The advantage and problem of tracing a movement in retrospect, with the benefit of
hindsight, is that we can see developments that actors of the time could not see. This warning
notwithstanding, we need to read the histories of these times backwards as well as forwards,
both as genealogy (with branches of a family tree dying out—analogies prove nothing, as
Sigmund Freud once wrote, but they make us feel more at home)6 and as teleology, even if a
cautious teleology. As the European debates indicate, the ideas that made for fascism were
already around at the end of the nineteenth century; they came together in the conjunctural
situation provided by the end of World War I, but this coming together was not predictable or
inevitable.7 In addition, there needs to be a place for conjunctural or longue dur ee perspectives
that are not entirely actor-centric even in work that takes actor-centric categories seriously—
for, otherwise, we confuse terms for movements and movements for terms, and the term
‘fascist’ as a descriptive as well as normative category loses its specificity or its usefulness.
There are difficulties in these attempts to bridge debates. The connections between fascist
ideas and particular Indian nationalist thinkers is an important theme that appears to fall

2
Stefan Arvidsson, Aryan Idols: Indo-European Mythology as Ideology and Science (Chicago, IL: Chicago
University Press, 2006).
3
Uwe Puschner, Die V€ olkische Bewegung im wilhelminischen Deutschland. Sprache—Rasse—Religion
(Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2001); and Stefan Breuer, Die V€ olkischen in Deutschland.
Kaiserreich und Weimarer Republik (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2008).
4
See Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, Hindutva: Who Is a Hindu? (Nagpur: Bharat Publications, 1928), by way of
comparison. For an analysis of the genesis of concepts of Hindutva, see Jyotirmaya Sharma, Hindutva:
Exploring the Idea of Hindu Nationalism (New Delhi: Viking, 2003), in which he treats the ideas of Swami
Dayanand Saraswati of the Arya Samaj, Aurobindo Ghosh, the revolutionary-turned-mystic, Swami
Vivekananda, the godman and founder of the Hindu missionary order, the Ramakrishna Mission, and Vinayak
Damodar Savarkar of the Hindu Mahasabha. Sharma does not relate his argument to the idea of the Volk, but he
might easily have done so.
5
The intermingling of ideas of race, nation and Aryan Hindu in India has been noted before. For a summary of
the debate, see Benjamin Zachariah, ‘The Invention of Hinduism for National Use’, Benjamin Zachariah
Playing the Nation Game (Delhi: Yoda Press, 2011), pp. 153 204.
6
Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (London: Hogarth Press, [1917] 1963). This was a
throwaway remark that I cannot trace the page numbers of manually, as I still have a paper copy.
7
Zeev Sternhell, ‘How to Think about Fascism and Its Ideology’, in Constellations, Vol. 15, no. 3 (2008),
pp. 280 90; David D. Roberts, ‘How Not to Think about Fascism and Ideology, Intellectual Antecedents and
Historical Meaning’, in Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 35, no. 2 (2000), pp. 185 211; and Kevin
Passmore, ‘The Ideological Origins of Fascism before 1914’, in R.J.B. Bosworth (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of
Fascism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 11 31.
 At the Fuzzy Edges of Fascism 641

between two more established academic disciplines: of the European study of fascism done
predominantly by those who see themselves as ‘Western’ scholars (with some work now being
done on eastern Europe); and of the study of major strands of (in particular) Indian
nationalism. This scholarship on fascism tends to ignore the extra-European writing for
reasons of embarrassment, disciplinary specialisation or (in)competence or because it is seen
as a secondary part of the history of fascist ideas. Many scholars of South Asian history, or of
intellectual history more generally, might also say that this is a question of European
‘influence’ on Indian thinking in a flat impact response sense.8 A good starting point,
therefore, is from a central question of nationalism anywhere, and also therefore of South
Asian nationalisms—the question of finding the ‘authentic’ voice of the ‘nation’, a voice
which had to be ‘indigenous’, not ‘foreign’.
This essay, therefore, studies the borderlands of an Indian engagement with fascism: the
idea of the authenticity of the ‘folk’, connecting to organicist ideas of community and nation
in the twentieth century whose protagonists recognised affinities with fascism and, later,
Nazism. The essay hinges on the use of ideas of the ‘indigenous’ or the ‘authentic’. It
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problematises the assumed linearity of ideas about a Hindu/Indian race or nation and also
questions the directionality of narratives of the travel and absorption of fascist ideas: not from
Europe to elsewhere, but multilinear and multilaterally invented.
To study this, it is important to place India in the wider context of the world at the time of
which we are speaking. The emergence of a fascist imaginary and a fascist set of political
organisations in the 1920s and 1930s depended to a large extent on a voluntary co-ordination
of ideas, movements and institutions that saw themselves as belonging to the same family, but
adopted the characteristics of a more successful sibling. A number of these ideas, in which
race and Volk were operative categories, had existed in earlier versions from the previous
century. The longer history of engaging with ideas of race and Volk in India and the world was
part of the same history, rather than a separate one, dating from the mid to late nineteenth
century. And the coalescing of ideological frameworks that were recognisably fascist or Nazi
took place in a context whereby the lesser strains in a worldwide framework of thinking
clustered around the more successful strains, borrowing and adapting from them and thereby
‘working towards the Nazis’—as they had worked towards the Italian Fascists before them.9
But this adaptation did not altogether abandon its right to manoeuvre, to select from a fascist
repertoire—and, later, to remould it to create new languages of legitimation. Indeed,
nationalism is particularly sensitive to the charge of being merely imitative: if the ‘authentic
genius’ of every people must find expression in the ‘nation’, obviously an imitative nation is a
contradiction in terms.
This essay does not discuss theories and theorisations of fascism and Nazism in any detail,
nor will it discuss a significant number of direct collaborative ventures between Nazi leaning

8
For a critique of which, see Paul Cohen, Discovering History in China (New York: Columbia University Press,
1996). On Indian ‘Auseinandersetzungen’ (with Italian Fascism and German Nazism), see Maria Framke, Delhi-
Rom-Berlin: die indische Wahrnehmung von Faschismus und Nationalsozialismus 1922 1939 (Darmstadt:
Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2013), esp. p. 14.
9
‘Working towards the Nazis’ is a reference to Ian Kershaw’s idea of ‘working towards the F€uhrer’, in which he
says that ordinary Germans, ordinary bureaucrats and other Nazis anticipated what they thought were the
F€uhrer’s wishes and sought to carry them out, which is what made an ordinarily weak dictatorship function. See
Ian Kershaw, ‘“Working Towards the F€uhrer”: Reflections on the Nature of the Hitler Dictatorship’, in
Contemporary European History, Vol. 2, no. 2 (July 1993), pp. 103 18. For a broader analysis on Indian
engagements with fascism, see Benjamin Zachariah, ‘Rethinking (the Absence of) Fascism in India, c.
1922 1945’, in Sugata Bose and Kris Manjapra (eds), Cosmopolitan Thought Zones: South Asia and the Global
Circulation of Ideas (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 178 209.
 642 South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies

and explicitly Nazi institutions and Indian co-workers or interlocutors (this has been done
elsewhere).10 It concentrates, instead, on providing close readings of a limited number of texts
and contexts to show some of the contours of the basis for Indo-fascist and Indo-Nazi
ideological affinities and exchanges, and on the idea of the Volk. The essay also concentrates a
good deal on ideas or ideological tendencies and frameworks to the neglect of actual
movements of (proto-)fascist paramilitary organisations and their political parent bodies, as
also the question of fascist aesthetics.11 Fascist movements are not original, not ideologically
consistent, are clearer about who or what they are against than what they are for, and are
willing to improvise or to borrow popular (and populist) elements from other movements.12 At
the same time, in order for resonances to be resonant, there must be a history of broadly
compatible ideas that become the basis of borrowings.
An analysis at the level of movements, the mobilisation of the alleged organic nation in the
form of paramilitary organisations, must also be carried out without sidestepping the question
of fascism. There is a populism at the empty core of fascisms, where the purificatory power of
violence, and the identification of the enemy within, operates at an important level beyond
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ideology.13 It is possible to use a ‘style’ argument and suggest that aspirations to military or
paramilitary mobilisation dating back to before World War I were universal in the India of the
1920s and 1930s, but also partaking of a worldwide tendency, in other words as a ‘fascist
repertoire’ rather than as a ‘fascist minimum’.14 The ‘fascist minimum’ argument relies on an
agreed-upon set of attributes without which a political movement is not yet, or not quite,
fascism, whereas a ‘fascist repertoire’ argument is less concerned with a check-list of
elements, all of which have to be present in order for the movement to meet the minimum
qualification as properly fascist. Instead, it enables us to see a wider repertoire from which
ideologues have the agency to choose. The repertoire tends to include an organicist and
primordialist nationalism, a controlling statism that disciplines the members of the organic
nation to act as, for, and in that organic or v€ olkisch nation, which must therefore be duly
purified and preserved, in the service of which a paramilitarist tendency towards national
discipline is invoked, and the coherence of the repertoire is maintained by invoking a sense of

10
This is argued in more detail in Benjamin Zachariah, ‘A Voluntary Gleichschaltung? Perspectives from India
towards a Non-Eurocentric Understanding of Fascism’, in Transcultural Studies, No. 2 (Dec. 2014), pp. 8 44.
The literature on how Italian Fascism started to resemble German Nazism after the Axis began to form (in
particular with regard to anti-Semitism) has been useful in this regard. See, for instance, M.A. Ledeen, ‘The
Evolution of Italian Fascist Antisemitism’, in Jewish Social Studies, Vol. 37, no. 1 (Winter 1975), pp. 3 17. I
use the term ‘fascist repertoire’ in the manner of Federico Finchelstein’s use of the phrase ‘fascist catalogue of
ideas’. See Federico Finchelstein, Transatlantic Fascism: Ideology, Violence, and the Sacred in Argentina and
Italy, 1919 1945 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), p. 6. See Benjamin Zachariah, Review of
Transatlantic Fascism in Social History, Vol. 36, no. 2 (May 2011), pp. 215 6, for an account of why this is
useful.
11
See the other essays in this collection.
12
Juan J. Linz, ‘Some Notes towards a Comparative Study of Fascism in Sociological Historical Perspective’, in
Walter Laqueur (ed.), Fascism: A Reader’s Guide (Harmondsworth: Pelican, [1976] 1979), pp. 13 78, esp.
pp. 29 31.
13
‘They subordinate thought and reason not to faith, as did the traditional Right, but to the promptings of the
blood and the historic destiny of the group. Their only moral yardstick is the prowess of the race, of the nation,
of the community. They claim legitimacy by no universal standard except a Darwinian triumph of the strongest
community’. Robert O. Paxton, ‘The Five Stages of Fascism’, in Journal of Modern History, Vol. 70, no. 1
(Mar. 1998), pp. 1 23, quote pp. 4 5.
14
Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), p. 58; Zachariah, ‘Rethinking
(the Absence of) Fascism in India, c. 1922 1945’, p. 184; Franziska Roy, ‘Youth, Paramilitary Organisations
and National Discipline in South Asia, c. 1915 1950’, unpublished PhD thesis, Warwick University, 2013; and
Zachariah, ‘A Voluntary Gleichschaltung?’, pp. 8 44.
 At the Fuzzy Edges of Fascism 643

continuous crisis and the potential for decay of the organic nation if that discipline and purity
is not preserved.15
It was recently pointed out that the Indian scholarship on the emergence of a Hindu Right
would do well to take seriously the writing of Arthur Rosenberg, who (unconventionally, for a
socialist at the time) saw fascism as a mass movement of the Right and not merely as a
distortion of bourgeois democracy caused by capitalism in crisis.16 This will prove to be a
fruitful intervention. However, we are still looking mainly at the predecessors of the present-
day Sangh Parivar, and the movement of ideas must be seen in a wider perspective than that.

The (Re)framing of Political Legitimacy

Methodologically, it is worth reiterating that the framing of the (re)presentation of ideas must
be taken seriously: statements made, often in didactic mode, when a text seeks to present an
idea, often regarded a priori as ‘foreign’, to a new audience. The texts themselves are often
opaque without the framing statement to explain them. These framing statements are often
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contained in ‘paratexts’17 that help us situate the author(s), something of their proclaimed
communicative intent, and the desired outcomes of their communication, which again is
illuminative of much more than the content of the text. A preface or introduction might
narrate, for instance, why national discipline, as practised in Fascist Italy, might be important
for ‘nation-building’ in India,18 or why the ‘race-pride’ exhibited by Nazi Germany needed to
be replicated in India, though directed against a different enemy.19 The political projects
sought to be enabled by the text itself are enabled and legitimated by the framing that is
suggested by the paratext. This becomes central to the use of the texts by readers as well as by
various intermediaries for whom their own roles in the furthering of the didactic project are set
out and clarified by the paratext.
In this respect, the by-now proverbial ‘autonomy of the text’ is matched by an ‘autonomy
of the paratext’, whose programmatic nature makes it important in its own right, apart from
the text to which it is attached. In another respect, the paratext seeks to constrain the
autonomy of the text by laying out the ways in which the text ought to be read and, therefore,
to curtail the range of readings that might otherwise be available: the author of the paratext,
whether or not s/he is the author of the text itself, seeks to maintain authorial control over the
dissemination of meanings in the furtherance of particular didactic projects. Here is a case for
not passing over the paratext quickly in our haste to get to the text, though of course this
should not be a call to ignore the text. There are, however, also instances of the paratexts
acquiring a life apart from the texts for which they were intended as paratexts, in these cases
becoming texts themselves and even acquiring paratexts in their own right. These texts are to
be found in English (the language in which many of these first appear) and in a number of

15
Michael Mann, Fascists (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. ix, sees a ‘family resemblance’ in
terms of ‘organic nationalism, radical statism and paramilitarism’ between fascism and many tendencies not
quite fascist as yet; in other words, he proposes a distinction that does not quite hold; italics in original.
16
Jairus Banaji, ‘Trajectories of Fascism: Extreme Right Movements in India and Elsewhere’, in Jairus Banaji
(ed.), Fascism: Essays on Europe and India (Delhi: Three Essays Press, 2013), pp. 215 30.
17
See Gerard Genette and Marie Maclean, ‘Introduction to the Paratext’, in New Literary History, Vol. 22, no. 2
(Spring 1991), pp. 261 72. Paratexts include prefaces, introductions, guest forewords, communications among
publishers, authors, translators and distributors, advertisements and their placing, and reviews quoted either in
advertisements or in the books themselves.
18
See Zachariah, ‘Rethinking (the Absence of) Fascism in India’, pp. 190 2.
19
See M.S. Golwalkar, We or Our Nationhood Defined (Nagpur: Bharat Publications, 1939), although in the
main text in Golwalkar’s case.
 644 South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies

Indian languages (languages into which they are often translated). Through this, the processes
of mediation through which the attempt to domesticate and operationalise ‘foreign’ ideas,20
and the processes of legitimation or indices of legitimacy of politics in India, as also the
relevant engagements of that politics, can be better understood.
Another set of paratexts—acknowledgements, advertisements and institutional affiliations,
for instance—point to the networks that disseminated similar sets of ideas and created the
crossovers that enabled the movements and translations of ideas of which we are speaking
here. The paratextual material leads us into an important set of debates about terms and
concepts. It is often taken for granted that the same terms in the same language, or in self-
evident translation, even when in use in different contexts, are more or less assimilable to one
another or, in other words, that they refer to similar concepts. This is especially true for the
modern world, certainly after the mid to late nineteenth century, where the consequences of
European or American hegemony in matters social, political or academic have ensured that a
few key concepts have been engaged with worldwide in broadly similar ways. What is often,
therefore, overlooked is that the same terms might actually refer to different concepts, and
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similar concepts might be rendered by different terms. This could happen within a relatively
stable linguistic context or time frame if variations such as class context or specialised usage
are taken into account. But the question is pertinent in bilingual or multilingual contexts in a
significant way.
Let us take the case of an attempt to build a modern political vocabulary during colonial
rule. There is, firstly, the question of how particular concepts are received by a group of
people adept at using the new language: English, for the sake of our example. These adepts
then, often self-consciously, look for parallels or similarities in their language in order to
translate the new set of terms and become the mediators of a process of attempted
domestication of the new language. In this process, two sets of concepts, in two linguistic
milieux, are assimilated to one another and, in the process, gravitate towards one another. New
institutional or statist forms were given invented parallels and predecessors in a Sanskritic
world, terms were unearthed from an often mythologised, selectively unearthed and sanitised
past, brought forward and equated with modern concepts that were expressed in the English
language.21
This is of course a simplified model, but it begins to illustrate the problem of equating
terms with concepts unproblematically, assuming relatively stable meanings. What we can in
fact observe is an attempt to create, in a ‘native language’, a set of terms that express new
ideas from a newly-acquired but desirable language. But the semantic range of the neologisms
thus found might retain, especially to users without access to the new language, something of
the old usages, or in the case where the neologism is completely new, not catch on at all.22
Equally, concepts are not transferred in some pristine form because they do not exist
anywhere in a pristine form, constantly being negotiated and remade. The shift to a new
context might result in the same term, in the same language, among one set of users (let us say
one particular public domain) being used with reference to a concept that is subtly or
significantly different from the concept among another set of users of the same term.

20
On ‘domestication’, see Dhruv Raina and S. Irfan Habib, Domesticating Modern Science: A Social History of
Science and Culture in Colonial India (Delhi: Tulika, 2004).
21
For a good example of this, see Radhakumud Mookerji, Local Government in Ancient India (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1919); and Radhakumud Mookerji, Indian Shipping: A History of the Sea-Borne Trade and
Maritime Activity of the Indians from the Earliest Times (London: Longman’s, Green & Co., 1912).
22
The reverse process, the incorporation of elements of the languages of the colonised into a new coloniser’s
language, and the shifts in meaning this has undergone, has been observed at least as far back as the Hobson-
Jobson in this particular case.
 At the Fuzzy Edges of Fascism 645

Volk and Authenticity: The Indigenist Imperative in Comparative Perspective

A near-perfect example of these processes can be found in the work of the academic innovator
and political ideologue Benoy Kumar Sarkar, who made an attempt to create a whole language
of the social sciences based on an ‘indigenous’, Indian set of concepts (Sanskrit-derived and,
therefore, not exactly in contemporaneous use).23 Near-perfect examples are inconvenient
precisely because they are so convenient and are, therefore, usually exceptional cases, but in
Sarkar’s case, he became a spokesman for, and a link figure in, several networks of scholars,
ideologues and political activists whose engagements ranged from the conservative to the
radical Right. His is the voice, and pen, that links a religious reform movement of middle-
class political nationalism in the Ramakrishna Mission and the godman Swami Vivekananda
(recalling, if you will, the idea of a ‘political religion’ that some theorists on fascism have
taken as central)24 with the imperialist fantasies of the Greater India Society; one might add he
represents the project of a ‘Swadeshi’ intellectualism that sought, in a more sophisticated
manner than the present-day Sangh Parivar but inexorably with a similar project, to present,
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and to perform, a glorious pre-colonial and predominantly ‘Hindu’ past for the Indian nation-
state-to-be.25
Benoy Sarkar remains nonetheless a figure whose writings absorbed and incorporated many
of the political ideologies of his age, not necessarily always because he was convinced of them,
but because these were already legitimate frameworks through which he could communicate in
the several languages (French, German, Italian, English, Bengali) in which he wrote and to the
several publics he addressed. If he remained politically convinced of any creed, it was Nazism,
to which he remained attached in public as late as 1942. Benoy Sarkar, who despite his open
Nazism somehow seems to get a rather good press from academics working on India (all of
whom absolve him of believing any of what he tried so hard to propagate), was not the only
Indian with such a versatile academic and public life. A number of itinerant Indian intellectuals
spent much of the early twentieth century wandering around the world, engaging variously with
the diverse ideological currents of the time: examples of note, leaving aside those who explicitly
placed themselves on the Left of the political spectrum, would have to include Sarkar’s fellow
Swadeshi intellectual Tarak Nath Das, who was, by 1913, a US citizen and a spokesman for
immigrants from India in North America;26 Har Dayal, Hindu-nationalist-turned-anarchist-
turned-Hindu-nationalist;27 and Maulvi Muhammad Barkatullah, Tokyo University Hindustani
lecturer, Ghadr movement propagandist and unlikely co-conspirator of the Bolsheviks.28 We can

23
Benoy Kumar Sarkar’s revival is only just beginning. See Satadru Sen, Benoy Kumar Sarkar: Restoring the
Nation to the World (Delhi: Routledge, 2015); Manu Goswami, ‘AHR Forum: Imaginary Futures and Colonial
Internationalisms’, in American Historical Review, Vol. 117, no. 5 (2012), pp. 1461 85; and Kris Manjapra,
Age of Entanglement: German and Indian Intellectuals Across Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2014), esp. pp. 143 60. Of these, only Satadru Sen has succeeded in bringing in something of a critical
reading, for in the ambiguous aftermath of the ‘post-colonial’ moment, to be ‘international’ or ‘cosmopolitan’ or
‘transnational’ is apparently to be worthy of celebration in and of itself.
24
Emilio Gentile, The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1996).
25
The classic work on the Swadeshi movement remains Sumit Sarkar, The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal
1903 1908 (New Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1973).
26
Hugh Johnstone, The Voyage of the Komagata Maru: The Sikh Challenge to Canada’s Colour Bar
(Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, rev. ed. 1914).
27
Benjamin Zachariah, ‘A Long, Strange Trip: The Lives in Exile of Har Dayal’, in South Asian History and
Culture, Vol. 4, no. 4 (2013), pp. 574 92; and the biography by Emily Brown, Har Dayal: Hindu Revolutionary
and Rationalist (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1975).
28
G. Adhikari (ed.), Documents of the Communist Party of India, Vol. 1 (Delhi: People’s Publishing House, n.d.).
 646 South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies

multiply the examples greatly, especially if we are to include lesser figures to whom the
spotlights of history have been less kind.
That Benoy Kumar Sarkar was an early enthusiast of Italian fascism who moved gracefully
on to Nazism as an enthusiastic supporter of the alleged innovations of Hitler’s Germany, and
of various aspects of Nazi politics, should be quite well known by now.29 Sarkar welcomed
the elevation of Hitler to power, writing that ‘Hitler is the greatest of Germany’s teachers and
inspirers since Fichte’,30 and elaborating that:

What Young Germany needed badly was the moral idealism of a Vivekananda
multiplied by the iron strenuousness of a Bismarck. And that has been furnished by
Hitler, armed as he is with two among other spiritual slogans, namely, self-sacrifice
and fatherland.31

Sarkar saw the Jewish question as a Kulturkampf in the manner of the Catholic
confrontation with the Bismarckian state, which he said no one heard of any more today
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because Bismarck had solved the problem. In a similar manner‚ ‘The Jewish question…[will]
be liquidated in Nazi Germany in a few years’.32 There is no obvious indication here that
Sarkar had anything like the physical liquidation of Jews in mind. The need for Nazi action
against Jews was allegedly because of the ‘over-Judaization of the public institutions in Berlin
as well as in other cities’, which made it necessary to ‘purge the public institutions of the Jews
and ordain for them a legitimate proportion of the services not exceeding the demographic
percentage’.33
In earlier times, Benoy Sarkar would also have been a logical volunteer for Right-wing
mobilisational attempts among Indians in Germany and attempts by the German Right to
move towards them. Fundamentally sympathetic towards a Germany humiliated and
dispossessed of its colonies after the Versailles peace settlement, he stated that Germany
would be a hope for the liberation of the colonies of other powers since Germany was now a
non-possessor of colonies:

It now remains for Germany to speak out and act in the manner in which the Orient
expects that a great race bent on the revindication of its claims should act both for its
own honour and national self-assertion as well as for opening out new vistas in
international relations and world-culture. The infiniteward energism of the ‘Fausts’ of
Young Asia as well as their Siegfried-like sadhana (Streben) for freedom will supply
the Volksseele of Germania not only with its spiritual nourishment but will also
furnish for it a bracing milieu of hopefulness and the perennial springs of creative
youth.34

In 1923, the ‘Bavarian extremist leader Hitler’, as British intelligence then referred to him,
was attempting to mobilise various maverick intellectuals from Turkey, Egypt and India

29
Giuseppe Flora, Benoy Kumar Sarkar and Italy: Culture, Politics, and Economic Ideology (Delhi: Italian
Embassy Cultural Centre, 1994).
30
Benoy Kumar Sarkar, The Hitler State: A Landmark in the Political, Economic and Social Remaking of the
German People (Calcutta: Insurance and Finance Review, 1933), p. 4.
31
Ibid., p. 13. Vivekananda, the first international godman produced by India, famously presented ‘Hinduism’ to
an international audience at the 1893 Congress of Religions in Chicago.
32
Ibid., p. 31.
33
Ibid.
34
Benoy Kumar Sarkar, ‘Asia and Eur-America’, in Benoy Kumar Sarkar, The Futurism of Young Asia and
Other Essays on the Relations between the East and the West (Berlin: Julius Springer, 1922), p. 37.
 At the Fuzzy Edges of Fascism 647

behind his new party.35 Mussolini’s Italian Fascists initially had more recruits among Indians.
But both ideological and organisational Indo-German Nazi connections were formed
reasonably early. In 1928, an Indisches Ausschuss or India Institute of the parent organisation,
the Deutsche Akademie, itself founded in 1925, was established.36 The co-founders of the
India Institute were Dr. Karl Haushofer, a specialist in ‘geopolitics’ and one of the
popularisers of the theory of ‘Lebensraum’37 so beloved of the National Socialists, and the
Bengali nationalist Tarak Nath Das.38 Along with Benoy Kumar Sarkar, Das had been part of
the National Council of Education in Bengal, which had debated a ‘Swadeshi’ curriculum for
an Indian education that would be free from the domination of colonial models of education,
but they were also interested in the basis of an ‘authentic’ Indian nationalism. The Deutsche
Akademie’s India Institute awarded scholarships to about a hundred Indian students between
1929 and 1938. The Institute also became active in pro-German propaganda during the Nazi
period. It was incorporated into the NSDAP Auslands-Organisation (NSDAP-AO)39 and was
instrumental in starting Nazi cells in various firms in Calcutta which were under German
control. It also funded German lektors who taught German to Indian students desirous of
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coming to Germany.40 Among the other Indians closely associated with the Institute in
Munich were Benoy Kumar Sarkar and Ashok Bose, the nephew of the future collaborator
with Nazism, Subhas Chandra Bose.41 A stream of Indian students continued to pass through
German universities and polytechnics throughout the 1930s, many of whom were to a greater
or lesser extent impressed by the Nazis; the India Institute of the Deutsche Akademie
continued to fund a number of these and to provide back-up support.42 Tarak Nath Das and
Benoy Kumar Sarkar continued to be associated with an extended circle of Nazis in the new
Reich, not least through the Deutsche Akademie.43 Some of the students returned to a home
university which also had by this time some institutionalised support for National Socialism,
such as Benares Hindu University or Aligarh Muslim University or Calcutta University, where
Benoy Kumar Sarkar was the leading light of its German Club.44

35
L/PJ/ 12/102, 1923, f. 2, India Office Records, British Library, London (hereafter IOR).
36
R51/1-16 & 144, Bundesarchiv, Berlin.
37
The term ‘Lebensraum’, borrowed from a biological idea of habitat, was used to make the claim that the
German Volk needed more space for itself and was entitled to expand its territories.
38
This is acknowledged in the official history of the Institute, to be found at Indien-Institut e.V. M€unchen [http://
www.indien-institut.de/en/chronicle, accessed 20 April 2013]. Note the sudden jump over the Nazi period:
nothing is said for the time between 1932 and 1946.
39
The NSDAP was the National Socialist German Workers Party.
40
‘Strictly Secret: An Examination of the Activities of the Auslands Organization of the National Socialistische
Deutsche Arbeiter Partei (sic), Part II: In India’, Indian Political Intelligence (IPI), file L/PJ/12/505, ff. 80-81,
IOR.
41
Publicity materials for the India Institute, Munich, distributed on the occasion of its 75th anniversary in 2003,
do not mention Ashok Bose or Benoy Kumar Sarkar. An earlier version of the Indien-Institut’s website did list
their names [http://www.indien-institut.de, accessed 20 May 2010], but this has been replaced by the version
cited above. Leonard Gordon, Brothers Against the Raj: A Biography of Indian Nationalists Sarat and Subhas
Chandra Bose (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), pp. 256 7, mentions Ashok Bose’s presence in
Munich from 1931 as a student of applied chemistry. Benoy Sarkar was also a regular contributor to Karl
Haushofer’s journal, Geopolitik.
42
R51/16, Bundesarchiv, Berlin. Records of students are few and far between, and it is unclear as to whether
they were obliterated by the vicissitudes of war or were deliberately destroyed.
43
‘Akademie zur wissenschaftliche Erforschung und zur Pflege des Deutschtums’, R51/1, rules of the
association, 1925, end of file, n.p.g, Bundesarchiv, Berlin.
44
Home Department (Special), files 830A, 1939 and 830(i), 1939, Maharashtra State Archives, Bombay. See
also Eugene D’Souza, ‘Nazi Propaganda in India’, in Social Scientist, Vol. 28, no. 5/6 (May June 2000),
pp. 77 90, based on the above two files, but lacking a context for them.
 648 South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies

To consider Sarkar merely a Nazi is to fail to attribute agency to an extremely creative

individual. But to see him merely as an extremely creative individual—even as he became the
spokesman for many of his generation, and indeed precisely because of that—is to miss the
wider points. One strand of thinking in India always wished to hold on to the alleged spiritual
core of ‘Indian’ civilisation, to amplify its anti-individualism, and to develop its v€olkisch
elements—without necessarily asserting that Indian civilisation was otherworldly and
spiritual.45 The renewal and strengthening of a ‘nation’ otherwise liable to decay ought to
come from the ‘folk-element’: this was understood and actively promoted in India.46 Similarly
influential was the organicist idea of a nation, combined with a militarist understanding of
mass mobilisation in the period leading up to and after World War I;47 this fantasy of military
prowess drew on emotional responses to British insults about the effeminacy of Indians, and
of Bengalis in particular,48 and can be seen in the hypermasculinity of Subhas Chandra Bose’s
plagiarism of the design of Mussolini’s uniform, boots and all, for his own use as he strutted
around on horseback as the leader of the Bengal Volunteers during the 1928 Calcutta
Congress.49 A longer interest in reviving ‘Arya Dharm’ or the ‘Hindu race’, and linking it up
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with European, and Theosophical, understandings of the Aryan ‘race’ as the most evolved of
the historically great races, and of Indian attempts to link up with these discussions as
resources of legitimation, played a long-term role in mobilising potential recruits to an
Aryanism that the Nazis also mobilised to good effect.50 The Aryanism of the Theosophists
was of interest and importance to early Nazi formations in Germany and Austria.51
Benoy Sarkar’s professed need for a return to authenticity, which we might
productively read as similar to, but militantly separate from Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj,52
thus stood in a long tradition of colonial Indian thinking, and about the pre-existence of
worthwhile and at least potentially modern historical examples and institutions in (mostly
ancient) India. Sarkar was more original, better read and, thus, less prone to using the
crudest and most obvious examples for his arguments, avoiding the idea that there was a
pure and untouched essence to ‘India’, but much of the driving force in his writing is an
almost post-colonialist insistence that India could provide or had provided the world with
great and worthwhile intellectual products. He extended this argument to whatever would
hold it, on one occasion reminding readers that Nietzsche, whose idea of the Will to

45
In this connection, see Sarkar, The Futurism of Young Asia and Other Essays, esp. the title essay, ‘The
Futurism of Young Asia’, pp. 1 22.
46
See also Sayantani Adhikary, ‘The Bratachari Movement and the Invention of a “Folk Tradition”’, in this
volume.
47
Roy, ‘Youth, Paramilitary Organisations and National Discipline in South Asia, c. 1915 1950’.
48
Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The ‘Manly Englishman’ and the ‘Effeminate Bengali’ in the Late
Nineteenth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995); and John Rosselli, ‘The Self-Image
of Effeteness: Physical Education and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Bengal’, in Past & Present, no. 86
(Feb. 1980), pp. 121 48.
49
Pictures of this iconic moment abound; the uniform itself is centrally displayed in a glass case at Netaji
Bhavan, Subhas Bose’s former residence in Calcutta, now a museum.
50
For the larger argument behind this, see Zachariah, ‘The Invention of Hinduism for National Use’,
pp. 153 204.
51
See, for instance, Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, The Occult Roots of Nazism: Secret Aryan Cults and Their
Influence on Nazi Ideology (New York: New York University Press, 1992); and Eric Kurlander, ‘The Orientalist
Roots of National Socialism? Nazism, Occultism, and South Asian Spirituality, 1919 1945’, in Joanne Miyang
Cho, Eric Kurlander and Douglas T. McGetchin (eds), Transcultural Encounters between Germany and India:
Kindred Spirits in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (London: Routledge, 2014), pp. 155 69.
52
Benjamin Zachariah, Developing India: An Intellectual and Social History, c. 1930 1950 (Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 2005), pp. 168 73, makes this point about the Swadeshi context for Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj.
 At the Fuzzy Edges of Fascism 649

Power he greatly admired, had learned his philosophy from the Manusmriti and his
politics from the Arthashastra.53
‘To the folk-element of all ages in India’ is the dedication for his book The Folk Element in
Hindu Culture.54 ‘In the reconstruction of Indian history, modern scholarship has to be
devoted more and more to the exposition of the influence that the masses of the country have
ever exerted in the making of its civilization’, Benoy Sarkar programmatically declared.55 To
understand this folk element, one must have undergone an ‘initiation amongst the folk’.56 He
then made a number of points in advance of the main text, and understandably so, because the
text itself is intimidatingly technical and opaque:

1. The masses and the folk have contributed to the making of Hindu Culture in all its phases
no less than the court and the classes (sic).
2. Secular, material and social interests, as contrasted with the other-worldly and spiritual
ideals, have had considerable influence in moulding Hindu life and thought.
3. The caste-system has never been a disintegrating factor in Hindu communal existence, and
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is most probably a very recent institution.

4. Hinduism is an eclectic and ever-expansive socio-religious system built up through the
assimilation of diverse ethnic, natural and spiritual forces during the successive ages of
Indian history.
5. There has ever been an attempt to govern the folk-customs, popular faith, image-worship
and public festivals by the transcendental conceptions of the Divinity of Man and the
Transitoriness of this World. The folklore of the Hindus is nothing but the adaptation of
their metaphysical culture-lore to the instincts and aptitudes of the ‘man in the street’. …57

There was, thus, a glorification of a sort of instinctive folk wisdom that was more authentic
than all the cultural sophistication of supposed higher forms—students of various Right-wing
populisms would find this theme readily recognisable. Culturally, Sarkar further declared,
there could be discerned a continuity across Asia of folk forms of religion, which meant that
distinctions made between Buddhist, Saiva and Vaisnava did not hold.58 This was more or less
a corollary to the ‘Greater India’ arguments made by some of his colleagues, whom he cited
approvingly in his books and who, likewise, cited him approvingly in theirs,59 who argued

53
Benoy Kumar Sarkar, ‘The Influence of India on Western Civilisation in Modern Times’, in Journal of Race
Development, Vol. 9, (1918 19), pp. 101 2. Originally, this was an address given at Columbia University,
New York, in April 1918.
54
Benoy Kumar Sarkar, ‘Dedication’, The Folk-Element in Hindu Culture: A Contribution to Socio-Religious
Studies in Hindu Folk-Institutions (London: Longman’s, Green & Co., 1917).
55
‘Preface’, ibid., p. vii.
56
Ibid., p. ix, quoting Professor R.R. Marrett’s paper ‘Folklore and Psychology’, read before the London
Folklore Society.
57
Ibid., p. x.
58
Ibid., p. xvi. See also Benoy Kumar Sarkar, Chinese Religion Through Hindu Eyes: A Study in the Tendencies
of Asiatic Mentality (Shanghai: The Commercial Press, 1916), from which he quotes at length in the ‘Preface’ to
The Folk Element in Hindu Culture.
59
See Mookerji, Indian Shipping; Radhakamal Mukherji, Borderlands of Economics (London: George Allen &
Unwin Ltd, 1925); and author’s ‘Preface’ in Sarkar, The Folk Element in Hindu Culture. It should be noted that
they do not merely cite each other’s works in a few footnotes, they declare their intellectual debts and
allegiances strongly.
 650 South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies

from the presence of Hindu and Buddhist monuments in South-East Asia that a ‘Greater India’
of a cultural and economic expansionist sort could be discerned in the history of those
countries.60 A sort of spiritual Lebensraum thus opened out for Greater India. The connections
among the scholars of the ‘Greater India Society’, based in Calcutta, Visva Bharati, Allahabad
or Benares Hindu University, should be noted, and for their popularisers, notably the Hindu
Mahasabha supporter and publisher-journalist Ramananda Chatterjee, there was a territorially
bounded India that was ‘Hindu’ and eternal, but the ‘culture’ of India was entitled to move
freely and colonise other parts of the world.
The ‘folk-element’ argument solved another problem of inventing a nation: upper-caste
Hindu textual or scriptural traditions would yield nothing of the numbers required in a nation-
building game. Meanwhile, non-caste Hinduism, if appropriated through this idea of folk
practices, could provide an idea of the organicist unity of the community that was to become
the nation. And the fantasy of mobilising the masses from above without losing control was
greatly enabled by the hope of an organic national discipline of the Volk.
We should pause here to outline the affinities of ideology or ideas that had longer,
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nineteenth- and early twentieth-century, pre-fascist histories. It is necessary at least to note

their existence. It is also far from obvious in which directions the ideas ‘flowed’: if some Nazi
mysticism had ‘Indian’ roots, and ideas of Aryan civilisation or supremacy transcended the
barriers of ‘West’ and ‘East’, this was to be expected, as the public arenas of ‘West’ and ‘East’
were not sealed off from one another, nor indeed separated in any way but polemically. And if
the exact relationships between v€ olkisch, organicist and fascist ideas are not clear, with
eclectic sets of ideas co-existing in the writings of users of Volk as a category (psychoanalysis,
biology, race),61 we could say with some certainty that the former sets of ideas were definitely
a part of a fascist repertoire, even if they were not only elements of a fascist repertoire. There
was a performative authenticity in recreating displays of v€ olkisch energy in public: these were
ideas as practices as much as they were ideas turned into practices, as the folk ‘revival’ of
Benoy Sarkar’s friend and co-conversationalist Gurusaday Dutt sought to mobilise.62

Leading the ‘Folk Element’

But the ‘folk element’ on its own was not exactly to be given autonomy without leadership
being exercised strongly on its behalf, and upon it. Benoy Sarkar’s appreciation of the
movement of the holy man Ramakrishna and his educated middle-class disciple Vivekananda
is worth looking at again in this connection. It might be recalled that Vivekananda’s
importance to India was Sarkar’s comparative yardstick for the importance of Hitler to
Germany. In a pamphlet derived from a speech and published in 1936,63 Benoy Sarkar’s

60
On the Greater India Society, see Susan Bayly, ‘Imagining “Greater India”: French and Indic Visions of
Colonialism in the Indic Mode’, in Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 38, no. 3 (2004), pp. 703 44, and also current
work by Jolita Zabarskaite, ‘Greater India in Indian Scholarship and in the Public Domain’, unpublished paper. I
am grateful to the author for sharing this with me.
61
Mukherji, Borderlands of Economics.
62
Frank Korom, ‘Gurusaday Dutt, Vernacular Nationalism, and the Folk Culture Revival in Colonial Bengal’, in
Firoze Mahmud and Sharani Zaman (eds), Folklore in Context (Dhaka: The University Press, 2010),
pp. 256 93; Frank Korom, ‘Inventing Traditions: Folklore and Nationalism as Historical Process in Bengal’, in
D. Rohtman-Augustin and M. Pourzqhovic (eds), Folklore and Historical Process (Zagreb: Institute of Folklore
Research, 1989), pp. 59 83.
63
Benoy Kumar Sarkar, The Might of Man in the Social Philosophy of Ramakrishna and Vivekananda
(Mylapore, Madras: Sri Ramakrishna Math, 1936), printed at the Commercial Gazette Press by J. Lahiri, 6, Parsi
Bagan Lane, Calcutta 2.
 At the Fuzzy Edges of Fascism 651

Ramakrishna is a v€
olkisch hero and his Vivekananda is a Germanic romantic. Of the unlettered
guru Ramakrishna, Benoy Sarkar wrote:

Neither the category ‘world-forces’, nor the category, ‘nationalism’, would have
conveyed any meaning to his life. And yet his Kathamrita, ‘the nectar of words’
(1882 86), has turned out to be the most dynamic social philosophy of the age, and
this has created for him a position of one of the great ‘remakers’ of mankind.64

Ramakrishna, for Benoy Sarkar, epitomised the ‘folk’. His was a ‘folk-language’, his wisdom
was ‘folk-wisdom’, his logic, ‘folk-logic’.65 His message of the equality of faiths, of
heterogeneous roads to freedom, laid deeper foundations for ‘inter-racial’ harmony. But
Ramakrishna was also somewhat akin to Fichte:

Fichte’s attitudes are well-known. Writing in 1808 for Young Germany he said: ‘Euch
ist das groessere Geschick zuieil (sic) geworden, uberhaupt (sic) das Reich des
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Geistes und der Vernunft zu begruenden (To you has been assigned the greater
destiny, namely, that you have to establish the Empire of the spirit and reason), und
die rohe koerperliche Gewalt insgesamt als beherrschendes der Welt zu vernichten
(and that you have to annihilate raw physical power as a determinant of the world)’. It
is this supremacy of the spirit and reason, and the emancipation of the mind from
matter, or rather the mind’s dominion over the world that constitutes the Leitmotif of
Ramakrishna’s sayings.66
In this synthesis of the transcendental and the positive he is but a chip of the old Hindu
block coming down from the Vedic, and perhaps still earlier times… . And it is on the
strength of this synthesis, again, that his Narendra, the Vivekananda thundered a
Young India into being, the India of economic energism as well as of spiritual
creativeness, of material science and technocracy as well as of self-control and social
service.67

The ‘moral and spiritual values’ of Ramakrishna and Vivekananda ‘were destined to constitute
the living religion of our country, of our masses and classes, during the present century’.68 In
those contexts Vivekananda was described as ‘the Carlyle of Young India’ and credited with
‘the gospel of Napoleonic energism and triumphant defiance of the Western chauvinists’.69
Vivekananda was ‘an Avatar of youth-force’, a socialist (but not like Marx, rather a romantic
socialist like St. Simon), a nationalist and an internationalist, who ‘served to establish the
universalistic, cosmopolitan and humane basis of all religious and social values’. He was, ‘like
Fichte, the father of the German youth-movement, an exponent of nationalism and socialism’,

64
Sarkar, The Might of Man, p. 1. Sarkar cited himself, referring to his ‘Bengali Positivism in the Sociology of
Values’, Calcutta Review (Jan. 1936).
65
Ibid., p. 4.
66
Ibid., p. 9.
67
Ibid., pp. 11 2. Sarkar cited himself again, referring to his Positive Background of Hindu Sociology, Vols.
1 2 (Allahabad: Panini Office, 1914, and 1921, 1926); and The Political Institutions of the Hindus (Leipzig:
Markert & Petters, 1922).
68
Sarkar, The Might of Man, pp. 12 3. Again, citing himself, he says that he had anticipated this more than two
decades ago in his Vishwa-Shakti (World Forces) (Calcutta, 1914, first published in the Grihastha, Calcutta,
1913).
69
Sarkar, The Might of Man, p. 12.
 652 South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies

preaching the ‘gospel…of energism, of mastery over the world, over the conditions
surrounding life, of human freedom, of individual liberty, of courage trampling down
cowardice, of world-conquest’, just as the West was ‘groping in the dark’ for a solution along
those lines. Nietzsche’s Also Sprach Zarathustra ‘had awakened mankind to the need for a
more positive, humane and joyous life’s philosophy than that of the New Testament’.
Vivekananda was a ‘pioneer of a revolution’ and ‘the positive and constructive counterpart’ to
Nietzsche’s ‘destructive criticism’. The doctrine of ‘energism, moral freedom, individual
liberty, and man’s mastery over the circumstances of life’ was promulgated by Immanuel
Kant and, later, by Robert Browning. The ancients already had the Upanishads and the Gita.70
Oswald Spengler, in his Untergang des Abendlandes, had been interested in the
transformation of epochs,

in what the Hindus would call Yugantara, in the ‘cultures yet to be’. In so far as
Spengler is looking for the ‘new element of inwardness’ such as can sponsor the
regeneration of life for the ‘world-historical phase of several centuries upon which we
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ourselves are entering’, he is echoing the Vivekanandist doctrine of Man-born-to-

conquer-Naturism.71

Sarkar’s parallels between Indian and German history are slightly strained—he cites Karl
Haushofer in connection with being superior to many, inferior to a few, but not among the
last72—and in his summary of Vivekananda’s message to the Bengali people, Sarkar quotes an
1897 speech ‘seven or eight years before the Bengali “ideas of 1905” take a definite shape’.
Vivekananda’s speech in Benoy Sarkar’s summary goes like this:

‘We have to conquer the world’, he declares, ‘That we have to! India must conquer the
world and nothing less than that is my ideal. It may be very big, it may astonish many
of you, but it is so. We must conquer the world or die. There is no other alternative.
The sign of life is expansion; we must go out, expand, show life or degrade, fester and
die. There is no other alternative’.73

In this context, citing Haushofer begins to make sense. Sarkar celebrates the fact that the
Ramakrishna Mission has begun to expand all over the world: Britain, Spain, Czechoslovakia,
Poland, France and Germany all have editions of Ramakrishna’s and Vivekananda’s works. ‘It
is but the six thousand year old Indian tradition of digvijaya, World-conquest, and elevation of
the most diverse races and classes to soul-enfranchising ideals and activities that Vivekananda
and after him the Swamis of the Ramakrishna Order have been pursuing under modern
conditions, thereby exhibiting the virility and strenuousness of Hindu humanism and
spirituality’.74

70
Ibid., pp. 15 7.
71
Ibid., pp. 17 8.
72
Ibid., p. 24. Here, there is a citation of Karl Haushofer, Jenseits der Grossmaechte (Leipzig: Teubner, 1932),
p. 489.
73
Sarkar, The Might of Man, p. 25.
74
Ibid., p. 28. Citations on this point inevitably include himself: The Futurism of Young Asia, as well as P.T.
Hoffmann, Der indische und der deutsche Geist von Herder bis zur Romantik (Tuebingen: Laupp, 1915); and
Helmut von Glasenapp, Indien in der Dichtung und Forschung des deutschen Ostens (Koenigsburg: Gr€afe &
Unzer, 1930).
 At the Fuzzy Edges of Fascism 653

Akhand Bharat and ‘Greater India’

We should recall here the invention of an Aryan Volk via Theosophy and neo-Hinduism (with
borrowings from the Orientalists), in order to stress the ambiguities of the appropriation.75
Towards the close of World War II, with the ‘Pakistan’ claim endangering the apparently
organic unity of ‘India’, the historian Radhakumud Mookerji found himself the spokesman for
the protagonists of an undivided India or Akhand Bharat as president of the Akhand Bharat
Conference at Lucknow University in January 1945. He declared:

I must assert once for all on behalf of Hindus, and with all the emphasis that I can
command as President of this All India Conference of Hindu leaders, that the
homeland of the Hindus through milenniums of their history has been nothing short of
the whole of India stretching in its continental expanse from Kashmir to the Cape,
from Nanga Parvat and Amarnath to Madura and Bameshwaram and from Dwarka to
Puri. The Hindus through the ages have built up the whole of this continent as their
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sacred, inviolable, and indivisible Mother Country and infused into it their very blood.
Since the days of the Rigveda, the earliest work of India and of the world, since the
dawn of history, the Aryan Hindus have conquered and civilised this continent and
breathed into it their very soul.76

He then makes peculiar use of a well-known terminological argument:

the term HINDU is not a religious but a territorial term, and any native of India,
according to Persians is a HINDU. Historically, every Muslim is a Hindu, and we may
give the quietus to all communal problems on this basis by taking India as the country
of one Nation called the Hindus.77

There follows a geographical argument to add to the terminological one:

India has been fashioned by Nature as an indisputable geographical unit marked out
from the rest of the world by well-defined boundaries and fixed frontiers about which
there can be no doubt or uncertainty.78

Belonging to ‘India’ thus was a matter of Blut und Boden, quite literally: a ‘natural’ geography
and sacred ties of blood made India an indivisible whole.
In his earlier work, Radhakumud Mookerji—who always warmly thanked Benoy Kumar
Sarkar in the acknowledgements and prefaces to his various books—claimed that ‘India’ had
always been a unity and, indeed, that ancient India already had had a nationalism.79 His
Nationalism in Hindu Culture was, unsurprisingly, a Theosophical publication, given that the
Theosophical Society played a major role in defining ‘Hinduism’ as a system, a world religion

75
Zachariah, ‘The Invention of Hinduism for National Use’, pp. 153 204.
76
Radhakumud Mookerji, Akhand Bharat (Bombay: Hind Kitabs, Feb. 1945), pp. 4 5.
77
Ibid., p. 8.
78
Ibid., p. 9. Earlier work, which he cites, includes his own The Fundamental Unity of India (From Hindu
Sources) (1913). Many of these started as articles in Dawn or The Modern Review, making for a very erudite
exclusivism underpinned by impeccable Swadeshi credentials.
79
Radhakumud Mookerji, The Fundamental Unity of India (From Hindu Sources) (London: Longman’s, Green
& Co., 1914); Radhakumud Mookerji, Nationalism in Hindu Culture (London: Theosophical Publishing House,
1921); and Radhakumud Mookerji, Local Government in Ancient India (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2nd ed.,
1920).
 654 South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies

and civilisation, and as ‘Aryan’, and even, through Annie Besant’s Central Hindu College in
Benares (the predecessor of Benares Hindu University), prescribed what Hinduism was.80
Aryan Path, the journal of the Theosophical Lodge of India, led by the sometime labour
organiser and Parsi Theosophist B.P. Wadia, introduced Kalidas Nag’s article on ‘Greater
India’ as recalling Madame Blavatsky’s statement in Isis Unveiled ‘that “India was the Alma-
Mater, not only of the civilization, arts, and sciences, but also of all the great religions of
antiquity”’.81 Mookerji was a member of the Greater India Society, his early book Indian
Shipping having centrally dealt with the importance of ‘greater India’ to mainland India,82 as
had his colleague Romesh Chandra Majumdar’s Ancient Indian Colonies in the Far East.83
There seems to have been no contradiction seen in asserting an India with a community of
blood and within boundaries ‘fashioned by Nature’, and celebrating the spilling out of these
boundaries into an Asia that was a ‘Greater India’ in an earlier phase of Indian colonial
greatness.
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Some Conclusions
The Volk and the organic unity of the nation were, as every ‘nation-builder’ knew, to be
created if necessary via eugenic efforts and national disciplinary formations. The alleged
honesty of a ‘folk’ religion as the true expression of the people was an attractive solution to
the problem of organic unity, but this true expression was always to be interpreted by relevant
and capable authorities. Theorists of fascism speak of ‘palingenesis’ or national rebirth in
terms of the importance of building the community or nation to be, as recovery from or
recompense for historic injustice.84 This would apply quite clearly to India.
Affinities with fascism generically are quite evident, and this route to fascism was not a
matter of imitation, but of a shared set of assumptions and thinking. Of the chaotic and
sometimes contradictory and unresolved thoughts represented in the attempts at systematic
thinking of even the best intellectuals of the times, we might say that much of this is at best a
fascist direction. And, indeed, it is possible to choose better examples if one is but searching
for unambiguously fascist ones. But the point of this essay is to show that the concerns,
anxieties, themes and assumptions behind many fascist ideas, and even more ideas that were
close to fascism, existed in an ‘Indian’ set of public debates that were not, and could not have
been, purely ‘Indian’.
A process of the unfolding of Ann€ aherungsm€ oglichkeiten—the possibilities of coming
closer together—with European fascisms that we are happier to recognise as fascism did not,
therefore, depend entirely on a process of copying ideas, imperfectly or otherwise; or in
another formulation, if Indians were not to be merely consumers of ‘modernity’, but also its
producers, why does this not apply to fascism as well?85 Perhaps equally importantly, in

80
See Leah Renold, A Hindu Education: Early Years of the Benares Hindu University (Delhi: Oxford University
Press, 2005).
81
Aryan Path (Jan. 1933), p. 3.
82
On the ‘Greater India’ idea, see Kalidas Nag, Greater India: A Study in Indian Internationalism (Calcutta:
Greater India Society Bulletin No. 1, November 1926).
83
R.C. Majumdar, Ancient Indian Colonies in the Far East, Vol. 1: Champa (Lahore: Punjab Sanskrit Book
Depot, 1927).
84
Roger Griffin, The Nature of Fascism (London: Routledge, 1991), p. ix.
85
Why must Indians simply be reduced to the role of perpetual consumers of modernity, and not its producers (to
borrow an argument from elsewhere)? Partha Chatterjee, ‘Whose Imagined Communities?’, The Nation and its
Fragments (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 3 13. I am not sure Chatterjee was referring
to fascism, but the argument can usefully be transposed to deal with fascism.
 At the Fuzzy Edges of Fascism 655

dealing with a question such as the fascist propensities of a political order, it is necessary to
treat genealogy and teleology together, writing history backwards as well as forwards, as I
suggested earlier. This is why my choice of presentation of texts and debates in this essay does
not follow a chronological framework in any simple way: there is not a ‘before and after
fascism’ tale to be told in any unproblematic way.
As regards fascism, of those who saw the implications of their ideas and their actions,
some pulled back. Others did not. A distinctively Indian fascism was and is possible, but is
still recognisable as a generic fascism. If we are to understand it as different, we need to
understand what it is different from and, therefore, we must have comparative parameters.
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