Perhaps, in the current national climate, readers will roll their eyes at an anthology titled Indian Nationalism, The Essential Writings, edited by the Aligarh Muslim University historian Irfan Habib. They know where he stands. His Wikipedia entry, peculiarly (and inaccurately), describes him as “being well known for his strong stance against Hinduism”. What Habib is against, he says on the phone, sounding a touch weary himself, is the nationalism of the moment—the strident, showy ‘Bharat mata’ worship and cultural bullying of the saffron masses.
It is “un-Indian”, he says, propagated “by people who believe in sloganeering, who speak without reading or understanding our past, who cherry-pick from history to justify or vindicate present-day politics”. Habib conceived, with his publishers, of the anthology almost as a corrective, “to put the evolution…
