Caste, nation and modernity: Indian nationalism's unresolved Dilemma

The relationship between caste and nation continues to be Indian nationalism's most important unresolved dilemma, although various nationalist leaders have been addressing this issue since the nineteenth century. As colonial ethnographers and officials argued about historic disunities and static hierarchies in Indian society, the nationalists began to construct a counter discourse of unity and integration. However, as they started scripting a historical narrative of the nation, the question of caste exclusion continued to pose a serious moral problem, as a modern nation had to be founded on the idea of equal citizenship. This essay looks critically at some of these competing visions of caste and unity within the nationalist thinking of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to highlight some of their ambiguities, as well as contradictions and shared grounds, to understand why this dilemma remains unresolved even today.