This post is an expanded version of a previous post I made in some other sub-reddit.

I would like to discuss whether or not India in pre-modern times had bonds that could be called "proto-national", or that represented an early form of modern, pan-Indian nationalism. My answer to this question is a clear and firm NO; India, in my view, had nothing that could remotely approach modern pan-Indian nationalism until the 19th century, and this nationalism largely emerged as a reaction against British imperialism. Without the British, it would be extremely unlikely, in my view, that any nation-state called "India" spanning the majority of the Indian subcontinent would ever come into existence.

To start off the discussion, I would like to refute some common Indian nationalist arguments that I have seen by drawing a comparison between pre-modern India and the pre-modern West (which essentially includes all lands from Portugal to Poland). Both of these entities were extremely diverse and were made up of many constituent parts that can be said to have a common "civilization" and common cultural elements, but nothing remotely approaching a sense of common nationality or national identity. Let me compare pre-modern India and the pre-modern West more explicitly, and demonstrate the fallacies of the Indian nationalist position:

• Indian nationalists claim that pre-colonial India was a single country because elites and educated people in almost all parts of India, from Kashmir to Kerala, learned and used Sanskrit. However, this is no different from the position of Latin in the West. Latin was used by intellectuals throughout Europe, and almost all scientists and scholars wrote their most important works in Latin, including Nicholas Copernicus from Poland, Galileo Galilei from Italy, Johannes Kepler from Germany, Rene Descartes from France, Isaac Newton from England, Carl Linnaeus from Sweden, and numerous others. Following the invention of the printing press, around 70% of Renaissance texts were printed in Latin, and not in regional languages like English, French, or German.

• Indian nationalists claim that pre-colonial India was a single country because of pilgrimage sites located throughout India that attracted Hindus, sometimes from distant corners of India. Once again, this is no different from what we see in Europe. Since early medieval times, we have Christian pilgrimage sites which attracted people from all across Europe. The most important such site was Rome, which housed the holy relics of St. Peter and St. Paul, but there were also many others like Tours in France (where the relics of the famous St. Martin are housed), Canterbury in England, and Santiago de Compostela in Spain. For medieval and early modern Europeans, such pilgrimage sites were of immense importance. Likewise, many monasteries across Europe were founded by people who came from different parts of Europe. For example, the Irish saint Columbanus founded the abbeys of Luxeil in France and Bobbio in Italy, while his disciple St. Gall founded the abbey of the same name in Swtizerland. All of these disparate, diverse regions of Europe shared a common Christian culture, and by the High Middle Ages, Christian monk could travel from Italy to France to Ireland to Sweden to Poland without crossing the boundaries of this common civilization.

• Indian nationalists claim that pre-colonial India was a single country because individuals like the philosopher Adi Shankara could travel from Kerala to Kashmir unmolested, and without being killed or shunned as an "outsider". Once again, this is no different from what we see in the West. In Europe, numerous teachers, philosophers, scientists, etc. traveled freely between countries and were patronized by rulers of different ethnicities from their own. The medieval philosopher William Ockham, for example, was born in England, but traveled to France to become a lecturer at the University of Paris, and later was patronized by Louis IV of Bavaria in southern Germany. The great anatomist Andreas Vesalius was born in Brussels in what is now Belgium, but traveled to Italy where he became a professor at the University of Padua, and later became the physician of Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor. The astronomer Tycho Brahe was born in what is now Sweden, but was invited to serve Emperor Rudolf II in Bohemia, in what is now the modern-day Czech Republic. We can list many more such examples.

• Indian nationalists claim that pre-colonial India was a single country because of a semi-mythical entity called "Bharatavasha" which is occasionally depicted as stretching from the Himalayas to the southern ocean. However, Europeans from Early Middle Ages onward also had a concept that they belonged to a common entity called "Europe". For example, the Life of Gertrude states that the Abbess Gertrude of Nivelles (in modern-day Belgium) was, by leading an exemplary Christian life full of piety, "well-known to all the inhabitants of Europe"; this demonstrates that the entity called "Europe" was not merely geographical, but was being defined in terms of a common Christian culture. Perhaps more concretely, following the Battle of Poitiers in which the Christian Franks repulsed the Muslim invaders, the chronicle Continuatio hispania described the victory at Poitiers as a "victory for the Europeans", making it clear that the term "European" referred to the Christian inhabitants of the continent. Do we have a single text from medieval times that similarly describes a Hindu victory over Muslim armies as a "victory for all Indians"? To the best of my knowledge, the answer is "no".

From this brief comparison of India and the West in pre-modern times, it should be clear that India was no more of a "nation" than Europe was. Both could be labeled as "civilizations" whose constituent parts shared some overarching cultural elements, but nothing more. Of course, I am not the first one to make such an analogy between India and Western Christendom; the historian John Keay, for example, also drew the exact same comparison, and arrived at the same conclusion, i.e. that India had nothing that could remotely approach a "national consciousness." (see this quote from p.154 of John Keay's book India: A History)

In addition, other historians have remarked how pre-modern Indians lacked even a concept of a unified "Hindu" religion that could be used to rally Indians from various regions under a common banner. See, for example, this quote from India before Europe by Cynthia Talbot and Catherine Asher.

In strong contrast, Europeans had a clear idea of a Western Christian civilization that was engaged in combat with Muslim, non-Christian enemies. This can be clearly seen, for example, in the rhetoric employed by Pope Innocent X when rallying European powers against the Ottoman Turks. Such a parallel does not exist anywhere in pre-modern Indian history. No Indian nationalist can name even three unequivocal instances of pre-modern Indian/Hindu powers from different regions of India uniting explicitly in the name of Hinduism against foreign enemies, as we see European Christians from distant parts of Europe uniting against common religious/civilizational enemies (if only temporarily) in medieval and early modern Europe.

In fact, the Indian nationalist position is so ridiculous that not even R.C. Majumdar, himself a famous Indian nationalist historian from Bengal, believes that medieval Indians had any meaningful sense of "nationalism" or "patriotism." On pp.127-128 of his The History and Culture of the Indian People, Vol. V (Struggle for Empire), he writes the following. Thus, as we can see, even the great doyen of the nationalist historiography himself admits that the Rajput princes whom modern-day Indian nationalists idolize as "national heroes" were, in fact, "oblivious of a broad national vision and patriotic sentiment." (exact quote)

Indeed, the modern Indian state, the modern Indian nation, and the modern Indian concept of nationalism are all products of the British colonial period, and did not exist even in a rudimentary form prior to the 19th century. Those who truly value the present Indian "nation-state" should be thankful to the British for creating the entity that exists today, for the Republic of India is nothing more than the direct successor state of the British Indian Empire. However, such an entity goes against the entire stream of Indian history, for there was nothing in Indian history prior to the modern colonial period that could remotely resemble a pan-Indian "nation-state," nor was there was any ideology in pre-colonial times that can remotely compare to modern Indian "nationalism" (which is not really nationalism, but simply blind loyalty towards an artificial state that attempts to represent everything, and therefore ends up representing nothing). The trajectory of Indian history, prior to the advent of British imperialism, was headed not towards the formation of some great pan-Indian united state, but rather towards the formation of discrete regional nation-states comparable to the nation-states of Europe. The analogs of the French, German, Italian, Danish, Hungarian, Polish, etc. nations in Europe are the Telugu, Tamil, Marathi, Kannadiga, Oriya, Bengali, etc. nations in India. However, the effect of imperialism in India was to suppress the natural growth of these organic nations, and to instead provincialize them and render them as mere subjects of a pan-Indian state. On this topic, it may be unfair to place the blame entirely on the British, for Islam also played a significant role in the destruction of proto-national identities in India, especially in the case of Panjabis and Bengalis (who today can barely even be regarded as single, coherent groups, in contrast to Tamils who have a strong sense of a monolithic ethno-linguistic identity).

I would like to end my post with a quotation from one of the great Telugu epics of modern times, the Pedda Bobbili Katha, which is a heroic account of the Battle of Bobbili in 1757. In this Telugu epic, two Telugu characters, the Velama Vengalarayudu of Bobbili and the King of Vizianagaram, are presented as fierce rivals. However, when faced with the French general Bussy, who is a foreigner, the Raja of Vizianagaram declares to Vengalarayudu that Bussy has a language that neither of them understands, and on this basis, they should join as one force to fight against him. Vengala refuses his offer, and dies a tragic but heroic death against the French forces. This is a fitting metaphor for the current state of many Indians, who are well-aware of their national identities (as the King of Vizianagaram was), and of the importance of their language, ethnicity, and region, and yet refuse to embrace this commonality fully and take it to its logical conclusion.