Imagining a Hindu Nation-Hindu and Muslim in Bankimchandra s Later Writings

The author explores the location of the Muslim and the Hindu nation in Bankimchandra's works as an interlinked formation that has to be situated simultaneously within his novelistic and his discursive prose. The two set up an internal dialogue and self interrogation that moved across his earlier, relatively open-ended and often radical phase and later more dogmatic and recognizably revivalist work. The paper is centrally concerned with the profound breaks in thinking and expression as well as with the fundamental continuities that were preserved through certain narrative tropes and devices by which Bankim continued to destabilise his seemingly unambiguous agenda of a triumphalist Hindu people.