NATIONS IN THE EMPIRE. THE MANY FACES OF INDIAN NATIONALISM, Proceedings of the International Conference held in Naples, Federico II University – Department of Political Sciences, 20-21 June 2023

This volume is the outcome of a conference held at the University of Naples Federico II as a part of the scholarly initiatives of the PRIN 2022 “Myths of Legitimations and Government of Difference in the European Imperial Regimes during the Modern and Contemporary Age”. The participants were invited to offer insights on one among the most crucial core-periphery relationships in 19th-20th-century world history, namely that between the British Empire and its Crown Jewel, India. Through an exploration of the nature of the conflicts as well as the collaboration and negotiation between different nationalisms and the British Empire, the Conference proposed to elucidate five main issues: How did the British Empire manage India’s diversity, and what was the response from Indian society? Has recent his- toriography gone beyond the dichotomous characterization of the British Raj as a project of “divide and rule” or as an impartial arbiter between conflicting communities, as the imperial myth claimed? To what extent were different nationalisms a product of India’s own contradictory mod- ernization, and this in turn an effect of the encounter/clash with the Em- pire? In which sense were India’s nationalist projects genuinely “national” – as opposed to “communal” – and how did they challenge or reinforce the British imperial politics of difference? To what extent has the variegated and internally conflictual nationalist movement in India and the imperial response to it shaped Independent India discourses on national identity and societal conflicts? More specifically, the contributors develop analyses grouped around two perspectives. Firstly, the comparative examination of different “religious” nationalisms, in particular Hindu and Muslim; and, secondly, the role of key figures representing different strands and different phases of the Indian nationalist movement, from Gandhi to Tilak, from Bhagat Singh to Ambedkar. In addition, the concluding essays aim to provide the reader with key elements of the historiographical background of the ongoing debates and controversies about the Indo-British relation- ship, namely the contribution and the evolution of the so called “Cambridge School” of colonial and global history.