Paper short abstract:

The paper explores visions of the political and religious self as a reformed moral community – with a set of emotions and virtues at the core of its identity - of the Delhi based Sufi shaikh, author and Muslim activist Khwaja Hasan Nizami (1878-1955) in the context of the contemporary Gandhian movement.

Paper long abstract:

The proposed paper looks at the role of emotions in collective identity discourses in late colonial India. Contemporary debates about religious and possible political communities often entailed negotiations of their envisioned mentality - the moral values, ethics, and emotional attitudes shared by its members as accepted norms and lived practices.

In the presentation I will outline the visions of an Indian nation, posed as an ethical community, of the political leader Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869-1948) on the one hand, and of the Delhi based Sufi shaikh, author and Muslim activist Khwaja Hasan Nizami (1878-1955) on the other hand.

Both actors imagine the political community as defined and legitimized through a specific moral core which is internal to the individual and expressed through a particular mentality. This has to be established in a process of introspection and proven through the performance of a particular set of emotions and virtues by its members. Personal reform becomes a central prerequisite for collective subjectivity here.

I argue that both Gandhi and Nizami construct the political community within the framework of their own religious worldview, the former Hindu, the latter Sufi Muslim, thereby reconceptualizing religiously connoted ethics associated with personal devotion and piety within a political teleological narrative. The nation on its part becomes a space for spiritual development.

I suggest that Khwaja Hasan Nizami offered a response from a Muslim perspective to Gandhi's vision of an inclusive Indian nation as a trans-communal spiritual and moral community, and a home for both Hindus and Muslims.