The National in the Triptych of Religion, Race and Caste: Kaye, Phule and Savarkar

This article contends that religion remained central to understanding ‘nationalism’ in Britain and India in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This proposition will be demonstrated in concrete form through reading, and cross - reading, three interpretations of the Revolt of 1857: John Kaye’s A History of the Sepoy War in India 1857–58 (1880), Jyotirao Phule’s Slavery (1873) and Cultivator’s Whipcord (1883) and V.D. Savarkar’s The Indian War of Independence (1909). The interpretations of the rebellion as both religious and national enable one to focus the analysis of these categories, and their stakes, through a study of their institutional and social contexts. A critique is thereby established of an extant historiography which separates the global emergence of nationalism from questions of religious identity and abstracts religion from questions of material authority.