Internationalizing India: from sub-empire to the Nation State

Thesis

The thesis is a History of Ideas project that engages with the conceptualization and evolution of Indian nationhood in Jawaharlal Nehru’s political thought. I argue that in the Nehruvian thought, the international expanse of both, pre-British era Indian empires and the Indian civilization became the basis of articulating India’s unity and statehood.

I discuss how Nehru traced the unity of the Indian nation not in domestic attributes but international influence of historic empires and Indian culture. For Nehru, an influential foreign policy, based on these attributes, could only become successful if India remained united. Drawn from empires, religion and civilizational attributes, the concept of Indian unity was understood separately from constitutionalism, as its basis was a detour from the principles of republicanism and democracy.

Thus, India’s political identity was demanded on the basis of its imagined foreign policy and these arguments later found space in the Transfer of Power negotiations, especially the drafting of the Indian Independence Act, 1947 where Indian nationalists insisted that India be defined not only as a successor state to British India, but also the ultimate successor to Mauryan state. In crux, the legal definition of inheritance of the Indian state was not simply an inheritance of territories once annexed by the Raj but reclamation of a timeless entity and an act of placing it back to the continuum of global history.

Authors: Joshi, P

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-noaw1a1kp
• Type of award: DPhil
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: intellectual history; foreign policy; empire; India; Nehru