| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Asia

William Gould. Hindu Nationalism and the Language of Politics in Late Colonial India. (Cambridge Studies in Indian History and Society, number 11.) New York: Cambridge University Press. 2004. Pp. xv, 302. $75.00.
In this provocative and important study, William Gould broadens and deepens our understanding of the rise of Hindu nationalism and the complexities of the nation-building effort that paralleled and intersected the nationalist struggle for independence in India. He focuses his analysis on the role of provincial and local politicians in the Uttar Pradesh (UP) Congress, their construction of a politicized Hindu framework for the campaign against colonial rule, and its impact on the national Congress's identity and its commitment to secularism.	1
While historians have noted the overlapping membership and links between the (UP) Congress and various Hindu nationalist organizations, major agency for the communalizing of north Indian politics has generally been assigned to forces beyond the control of the Congress. In this reading, the colonial state's emphasis on caste and religious identities, the rise of Muslim separatist politics, and the establishment of institutions of the Hindu right share responsibility for the challenge to a progressive, modernist, and inclusive Congress unity message. Gould's work deconstructs this image of the Congress by emphasizing its "heterogeneity," the role of individuals in such a strategically significant setting as Uttar Pradesh acting in its name, and the variable forms of secularism that they embraced. In this regard, he notes the porousness of ideological borders and the ways in which apparently antagonistic ideas of nationhood could and did coexist.	. . .

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