Crossing the boundaries: Anti-colonialism, Pan-Asianism, and Hindu National History in the ‘Greater India’ Movement, 1926-1945

The interpretation of complex cultural movements requires an adequate historical contextualisation in order to identify the original meanings of seemingly contradictory inner currents. This is illustrated by focussing on the ‘Greater India’ movement, a scholarly endeavour of the interwar decades aimed at recovering the ‘forgotten chapter’ of ancient India’s cultural expansion across Asia. While its anti-colonial, cosmopolitan and progressive nature has been largely acknowledged in literature, it has also been seen as contiguous to aggressive forms of Indian nationalism as well as to communalism. This ambiguity is analysed and explained in the light of the social, political and ideological contours of colonial Bengal in the inter-war decades. The paper also interprets Kalidas Nag’s critique of analytical categories of Western historiography on Asia as an attempt at crossing the boundaries of colonial notions of Indian cultural identity.