The Origins of Indian Nationalism

The essay focuses on a Bayly's collection of essays, "Origins of Nationality in South Asia", that came out in 1998, including a number of unpublished ones from some years before, aiming to shed new light on Indian nationalism in the late pre-colonial period and during English domination. In controversy with modernist interpretations, Indian nationalism emerges mainly as the result of the circulation of ideologies and exchanges of ideas and models which, despite taking place in a non-egalitarian context marked by the colonial power relationship, also developed on a level that was in many ways horizontal and in no way unilateral. It was thus in his specialist studies on India that Bayly began to outline his interpretation of the development of nationalism outside Europe that would be given greater coverage in The Birth of the Modern World.