Post Colonial Thoughts of Iqbal, Jinnah, Nehru and Gandhi

Imagined Community: Gandhi, Nehru, Iqbal and Jinnah’s Post-colonial Nations

Introduction

The concept of nationalism is often the subject of philosophical debate, and various definitions of the term nation and nationalism tend to widely fail under harsh analytical scrutiny of differing perspectives (Miscevic, 2008). Whereas, a term such as race can be specifically said to define a given group of people, the terms ‘nation’ and ‘nationalism’ are difficult to be specifically defined as they raise a lot of opposing views. The problem often in describing nations primarily come under the following questions, as described by Miscevic (2008); “what is it to belong to a nation, what is the nature of pro-national attitudes, is membership in a nation voluntary or non-voluntary… Is the attitude of caring about national identity always appropriate, how much should one care?” Anderson (1983) popularly tried to define nations as “an imagined political community (that is) imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign”. In Anderson’s definition, he widely justified the imagined, limited, sovereign and community nature of nations. As such, it allows categorical analysis of various ideologies of how nation should be under the premises of the aforementioned nature defined by Anderson.

In this paper, we seek to compare and analyze the ideology of Gandhi, Nehru, Jinnah, and Iqbal with Anderson’s concept of nation as an ‘imagined community’. To this extent, we would first briefly explain the Anderson’s concept and various aspects of his definition of a nation. Following a brief overview of the concept of ‘imagined communities’, we would separately identify the ideology of Gandhi, Nehru, Jinnah and Iqbal relating to how they perceived the post-colonial nation should be. This would be respectively followed by a comparison of the various perspectives with Anderson’s theory of ‘imagined community’. In the paper, we would also consider the concepts of primordiality and modernism...