Paper short abstract:

The presentation shows how, from the 1950s into the present, two strands/ideals of Indian nationalism in Bengal – ideals of paradise and utility, respectively – come to constitute a third: education as a moral imperative.

Paper long abstract:

The presentation focuses on the Bengali bhadralok, for a time India's nationalist elite, and three strands, or ideals, of Indian nationalism, as they intertwined and overlapped from the 1950s to the present. I argue that culturally-specific debates about paradise and utility (utilitarianism), respectively, are two strands/ideals that, in turn, serve as the 'constitutive outsides' of a third strand/ideal, one that bound together education and nationalism in a manner that remains central in India. Part One focuses on paradise, seen as a present rarefied through awe-inspiring and transformative experience, experience that is a sensory-yet-spiritual and aesthetic-yet-moral end-in-itself. Bengal's aristocrats claimed that they alone could produce, or approximate, such heaven-on-earth. Part Two analyses utilitarianism as expressed in the postcolonial imperative of progress. The virtue of utility is the purview of the entrepreneur, who harnesses technological innovation and economic efficiency. The utilitarian agenda is, perhaps ironically, to establish means-to-end(s) modes of being as the nation's ultimate goal. In Part Three the presentation shows that both strands/ideals promote transformation, each is haunted by its own sense of decline, and each makes respective claims about who among 'the people' are to guide the polity. Significantly, out of these two strands a third emerges and endures: the ideal of education as a way of bringing together paradisiacal and utilitarian thinking and in a manner so as to produce a democratic polity. The argument has important implications for contemporary discussions about the interrelations among democracy, liberalism, and theology.