History matters in contemporary debates on nationalism, Sugata Bose contends in The Nation as Mother. In this interconnected set of deeply researched and powerfully argued essays and speeches Bose explores the relationship between nation, reason and religion in Indian political thought and practice. Offering a subtle interpretation of the ways of imagining the nation as mother, the book illuminates different visions of India as a free and flexible federal union that have acquired renewed salience today.

Breaking out of the false dichotomy between secular Worldnationalism and religious communalism, the author provides incisive analyses of the political legacies of Tagore and Gandhi, Nehru and Bose, Aurobindo and Jinnah, and a range of other thinkers and leaders of the anti-colonial movement.

In arguing against the dangers of an intolerant religious majoritarianism, this book makes a case for concepts of layered and shared sovereignty that might enable an overarching sense of Indian nationhood to coexist with multiple identities of the countrys diverse populace. The Nation as Mother delves into history on the occasion of the seventieth anniversary of freedom to evoke an alternative future of a new India based on cultural intimacy among its different communities.

About the Author: Sugata Bose

Sugata Bose is the Gardiner Professor of history at Harvard University. He was a recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship in 1997 and gave the G.M. Trevelyan Lecture at the University of Cambridge. Bose, who is Netajis brother Sarat Chandra Boses grandson, is the author of many books, including Peasant Labour and Colonial Capital and the much-acclaimed A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire.