Yorim Spoelder is currently a PhD-candidate in Global History at the Friedrich Meinecke Institut (Freie Universität Berlin). His project "Staging the Nation Beyond the Raj: Visions of Greater India, the Discourse of Civilization and Nationalist Imagination 1905-1960” is supervised by Prof. Dr. Sebastian Conrad. He earned a Master's degree in Global Studies at the Albert Ludwigs University of Freiburg, JNU New Delhi and the University of Cape Town (2012-2014). He was previously an international student fellow and seminar tutor at the Albert Ludwigs University of Freiburg (2012/2013-14), connected as a research intern with the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi (2013) and involved as a student and student assistant with the Global History Program at the Freie Universität Berlin (2014-2016).

Staging the Nation Beyond the Raj: Visions of Greater India, the Discourse of Civilization and Nationalist Imagination (1905-1960)

Zooming in on the post-Swadeshi nationalist momentum in Bengal, this project aims to write an intellectual history of the emergence, heyday and afterlife of the Greater India discourse by mapping the scholarship, visions and transnational networks of Greater India scholars such as Kalidas Nag, Benoy Kumar Sarkar, Radha Kumud Mukherjee, Ramesh Chandra Majumdar, Bijan Raj Chatterji and Panindranath Bose.

Publications of the Greater India Society (1926) typically highlighted the connections of ancient Indian polities with China, Southeast Asia as well as Central Asia and foregrounded a “Golden Era” of diffusion during which Indian missionaries, traders and settlers spread a highly cultured form of Buddhist or Hindu civilization beyond the subcontinent. The logic of cultural diffusionism, the rhetoric of colonization and the notion of a “civilizing mission” reveal strong discursive links with British imperial ideology. Yet the entanglement of Greater India scholars with multiple transnational intellectual networks – e.g. the cordial links with Pan-Asian thinkers and the intensive academic cooperation with Dutch and French Indologists - helped destabilize Anglophone “colonial” assumptions about India and Indian history and paved the way for a discourse in which the nation and its ancient history became increasingly staged beyond the territorial and epistemic limits of the British Raj.

This project aims to interpret the Greater India discourse not just as an important historiographical intervention but - equally - as a multifaceted, politically charged and oftentimes self-contradictory vision whose timing, content and appeal can only be understood in the context of the constantly evolving anti-colonial struggle, nascent nationalist visions, the shifting discourse of civilization, and wider transnational ideological currents and networks as well as transcolonial knowledge transfers.

contact: ys14@zedat.fu-berlin.de