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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 April 2018
This article explores how local lived experiences and nationalist sentiments converged to shape a regional literati's conception of the province of Bihar in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century colonial India. Following the formation of the separate province of Bihar in 1912, certain very powerful Indian-nationalist and cultural-historical factors were deployed to create a much-needed cultural-historical past for Bihar. In this project of territorial self-fashioning, institutions such as the Bihar and Orissa Research Society (1915) and the Patna Museum (1917) became crucial to the new political-cultural configuration of the region. Additionally, they also made Bihar's ancient past visible in a deliberately nationalist narrative. Projecting its rich ancient past onto a national framework provided Bihar with the possibility of overcoming its characterization as ‘backward’ and provincial. This article therefore moves beyond analytic frameworks of nationalism which emphasize particularities of regional identity by framing them in perpetual antagonism to the efforts of Indian national integration. By looking at the construction of narratives of an ancient past that straddled the region and the nation, I argue that the emergence of an entity called Bihar was braided into India's nationalist imagination.
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8 Hereafter BORS.
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27 ‘The Bihar and Orissa Research Society’, Behar Herald, 29 January 1916.
28 Ibid. This is best exemplified by the varied background of the contributors to the first issue of the journal where, as the Behar Herald emphasized, ‘an American Sanskritist [D. B. Spooner], a pure Bengali pandit [Mahamahopadhyaya Hara Prasad Shastri], a Hindu barrister from Mirzapur (U.P) [K. P. Jayaswal], a Bengali lawyer domiciled in Chota Nagpur [Sarat Chandra Roy], and a German missionary [Reverend Father J. Hoffmann], all co-operating to advance our knowledge of the province and its past’.
29 Ibid.
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69 Ibid.
70 Gyan Prakash, ‘Science “Gone Native” in Colonial India’, Representations, no. 40, Autumn 1992, p. 163.
71 The proposal for archaeology and ethnography to be the only sections in the museum were made by a committee comprising J. G. Jennings MA, the director of public instruction for the province of Bihar and Orissa; V. H. Jackson, the principal of Patna College; and G. E. Fawcus, MA, the inspector of schools, Chota Nagpur Division, Ranchi. During the first 15 years of the publication of JBORS, there are 20 articles on ethnography essayed by Sarat Chandra Mitra, MA BL; he was initially identified as belonging to Chapra but by the late 1920s his designation changes to that of lecturer in social anthropology at the University of Calcutta.
72 Prakash, ‘Science “Gone Native”’, p. 163.
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87 Davis, Lives of Indian Images, pp. 3–6; Guha-Thakurta, ‘The Endangered Yakshi’. Both Davis and Guha-Thakurta begin with accounts of the discovery of the statue. It would be helpful to briefly recollect the moment of its discovery.
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100 Ibid., p. 88. One, Udayin (488–467 BCE), was the founder of Pataliputra, and the other was the great conqueror Nandi-Vardhana (449–409 BCE).
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