Making of the Indian Nation: Bankim’s Idea of Nation as Mother in Colonial Bengal

Abstract

This article endeavours to explore a hitherto untouched field of research on the Indian freedom movement in general and the making of the Indian nation in its own cultural sphere in particular, that is, the detailed study of the idea of Nation as Mother of the famous novelist Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay in the late nineteenth-century colonial Bengal. No work on the details of the idea of the Nation as Mother in colonial Bengal has been produced so far. This article tries to look into the inception, germination, evolution, articulation and expression of Bankim Chandra’s idea of the Nation as Mother, the nature of the fertile land of Bengal where this idea was projected, and also the imagery of the mother nation in late nineteenth-century colonial Bengal within the framework of the Indian national movement. The central point is that Bankim Chandra’s idea of the Nation as Mother was sufficiently powerful and emotionally charged in the fertile land of Bengal to create nationhood by inspiring a bond of fraternity and giving birth to an imagined community of the devoted and dutiful children of dear Mother India by producing explicit rhetoric of unison.