Revisiting Bankim Chandra’s Idea of Cultural Nationalism-A Perspective

Abstract

In the 19^th Century, due to the influence of the West, there was a tendency to offer reasons for and against standard practices. Dharmic traditions and practices, too, suffered a similar fate. Young nerves in Bengal were influenced by Western culture and started to doubt the validity of any classical understanding of life's problems. Several attempts to understand dharma as being based on morality, science, art, or as a type of philosophy have resulted in a wide range of views among classical philosophers. On the other hand, there have been some critical attempts to distinguish religion from other forms of understanding. It has been argued that the enterprise started by early classical thinkers to rescue religion from obscurity and isolate what is unique about it by approaching it psychologically dominates our thought today. Bankim was the one who attempted to offer a secular basis for religion to a mind that had already embraced the empirical objection to all suprasensible phenomena. Thus, this paper will further explore the colonial literary thoughts raised by Bankim against the secular orientation of dharma in the Indian context.