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Provincial Pasts and National Histories: Territorial self-fashioning in twentieth-century Bihar

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2018

ARYENDRA CHAKRAVARTTY
ARYENDRA CHAKRAVARTTY*
Affiliation:
Department of History, Stephen F. Austin State University, Texas, USA Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

This article explores how local lived experiences and nationalist sentiments converged to shape a regional literati's conception of the province of Bihar in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century colonial India. Following the formation of the separate province of Bihar in 1912, certain very powerful Indian-nationalist and cultural-historical factors were deployed to create a much-needed cultural-historical past for Bihar. In this project of territorial self-fashioning, institutions such as the Bihar and Orissa Research Society (1915) and the Patna Museum (1917) became crucial to the new political-cultural configuration of the region. Additionally, they also made Bihar's ancient past visible in a deliberately nationalist narrative. Projecting its rich ancient past onto a national framework provided Bihar with the possibility of overcoming its characterization as ‘backward’ and provincial. This article therefore moves beyond analytic frameworks of nationalism which emphasize particularities of regional identity by framing them in perpetual antagonism to the efforts of Indian national integration. By looking at the construction of narratives of an ancient past that straddled the region and the nation, I argue that the emergence of an entity called Bihar was braided into India's nationalist imagination.

Type
Research Article
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Modern Asian Studies , Volume 52 , Issue 4 , July 2018 , pp. 1347 - 1374
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

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8 Hereafter BORS.

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28 Ibid. This is best exemplified by the varied background of the contributors to the first issue of the journal where, as the Behar Herald emphasized, ‘an American Sanskritist [D. B. Spooner], a pure Bengali pandit [Mahamahopadhyaya Hara Prasad Shastri], a Hindu barrister from Mirzapur (U.P) [K. P. Jayaswal], a Bengali lawyer domiciled in Chota Nagpur [Sarat Chandra Roy], and a German missionary [Reverend Father J. Hoffmann], all co-operating to advance our knowledge of the province and its past’.

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100 Ibid., p. 88. One, Udayin (488–467 BCE), was the founder of Pataliputra, and the other was the great conqueror Nandi-Vardhana (449–409 BCE).

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