The argument about the 'limits' of the subaltern school of writing history begins with a biased rendering of the school's ideas. Her remarks about Indian academia being 'essentially derivative' and fearful of Hindutva in its analysis of Indian modernity are surprising. It gets uncomfortable when Vajpeyi delegitimises other ways of seeing modern India. The book glosses over Ambedkar's politics when evaluating his conversion to a 'classical' tradition, Buddhism, and Kabir's syncretism is simply portrayed as an ideal Indian trait. This issue remains unresolved despite Vajpeyi's discussion of Ambedkar and Kabir. 'Indian' civilization is here defined as flowing from 'classical' Sanskrit, Buddhist and Jain texts, not from lived traditions. So, non-dominant, non-textual traditions - based in caste, region, class, religion - become irrelevant to this book's idea of India's civilizational 'self'. Vajpeyi's argument hinges on the reader making two assumptions: one, that the dominant tradition of imagining Indian civilization can be represented using specific texts and the art work of five founders chosen by her and two, that the dominant tradition is the only legitimate one. Now, when globalisation and neoliberal economic policy have again put India's sense of self in peril, Vajpeyi suggests we place our faith in the dominant nationalist political tradition of these founders, who provide an Indian civilizational blueprint for resolving the country's socio-economic crises. Righteous Republic, Ananya Vajpeyi's contribution to the idea-of-India genre, describes how Mohandas Gandhi, Rabindranath Tagore, Abanindranath Tagore, Jawaharlal Nehru and Bhimrao Ambedkar imagined the moral-political motives of independent India.įor Vajpeyi, these five 'founding figures' reconfigured their 'rich intellectual traditions' to create an idea of an independent modern Indian nation state and an independent Indian 'self'.

Righteous Republic by Ananya Vajpeyi