(a) Political extremism in colonial India often converged with cultural nationalism, but not always. – Comment. (20 marks) (b)…

(a) Extremism and Cultural Nationalism

Late nineteenth and early twentieth-century political extremism frequently utilized cultural revivalism to breach elite confines and mobilize the masses. Bal Gangadhar Tilak transformed traditional Ganeshotsav and Shivaji festivals into potent instruments of public assembly and anti-colonial agitation. Similarly, Aurobindo Ghosh conceptualized the nation as the divine Motherland through Bande Mataram, infusing political struggle with Vedantic spiritualism to generate moral urgency and sacrificial commitment; and Savarkar’s Abhinav Bharat (1904) fused secret revolutionary organisation with an explicit Hindu cultural nationalism.

However, extremism did not consistently converge with cultural nationalism. The revolutionary phase of the 1920s and 1930s prioritized political action and universalist ideologies over religious framing. The Hindustan Socialist Republican Association (HSRA), influenced by Marxism, subordinated cultural symbolism to an egalitarian socio-political program; Bhagat Singh’s writings (‘Why I am an Atheist’, his socialist internationalism) and the Ghadar Party (1913), which combined Punjabi-Sikh migration networks with a secular republican programme, kept political radicalism autonomous from religious idiom. The Chittagong armoury raid (1930), organized by Surya Sen’s Indian Republican Army, was driven by revolutionary republicanism rather than cultural revival. Furthermore, figures like Ashfaqulla Khan (Kakori, 1925) embodied militant anti-colonialism while remaining entirely outside the Hindu cultural idiom. Extremism, therefore, operated as a broad tactical and ideological spectrum where political radicalism often functioned autonomously from cultural nationalism.

(b) Developmental Imperatives and Linguistic Particularism in Post-1947 Regionalism

Post-independence regionalism was initially propelled by linguistic particularism. Potti Sreeramulu’s fast-unto-death in 1952 precipitated the creation of Andhra State, prompting the States Reorganisation Commission (Fazl Ali, K.M. Panikkar, H.N. Kunzru, 1955) and the States Reorganisation Act (1956), which systematically aligned administrative boundaries with linguistic lines. This dynamic continued with the bifurcation of Bombay State into Maharashtra and Gujarat in 1960 and the anti-Hindi agitations in Tamil Nadu in 1965, which established language as a core vehicle for regional identity and federal bargaining.

Concurrently, developmental imperatives played an equally decisive role in generating regional discontent. Uneven capital allocation and public investment exacerbated inter-state inequalities. The Green Revolution widened disparities by concentrating agricultural prosperity in the north-western states, leaving eastern regions economically neglected. Chronic water-sharing disputes over the Krishna and Cauvery river basins transformed natural resource management into persistent regional conflicts. Additionally, historical industrial backwardness generated enduring regional demands for Special Category Status from states such as Bihar and Odisha, demonstrating that material deprivation and economic competition shaped regional assertions as deeply as linguistic affinities. The freight equalisation policy (1952), which pooled railway tariffs and disadvantaged the mineral-rich eastern regions, is a classic developmental grievance; and the second-generation movements — Telangana (2014), Jharkhand, Uttarakhand and Chhattisgarh (2000) — combined identity claims with demands for control over local resources and budgets.

(c) Strategic Costs of the Treaty of Salbai (1782)

The Treaty of Salbai (1782) ended the First Anglo-Maratha War by restoring the status quo ante, returning most occupied territories (the Company kept Salsette) and pensioning off Raghunath Rao. Mahadji Scindia mediated it, and the Marathas undertook to make Hyder Ali restore Company territory, which broke the anti-British coalition with Mysore. While it was hailed as a diplomatic success for Nana Phadnavis, the resulting twenty years of peace proved catastrophic for the Marathas in strategic terms.

The two-decade respite provided the British East India Company the time required to consolidate its administrative and revenue apparatus in Bengal without facing a pan-Indian confederacy. Crucially, it split the Indian powers: the Marathas even joined the Company and the Nizam against Tipu in the Third Anglo-Mysore War (1790–92) and stood aside in the Fourth (1799), eliminating Britain's most formidable southern adversary. When Lord Wellesley assumed office in 1798 and advanced the Subsidiary Alliance system, the Maratha polity had disintegrated into internecine warfare among the Scindias, Holkars, and the Peshwa. Consequently, during the Second Anglo-Maratha War (1803–05), the British dismantled the fragmented Maratha Confederacy from an unassailable position of financial and military superiority. The denouement came with the Treaty of Bassein (1802) and the Third Anglo-Maratha War (1817–18), which ended in the deposition of the Peshwa and the annexation of Maratha territories — the long-term price of the twenty-year peace. The judgement needs qualification: the peace also let Mahadji Scindia build a modernised army and dominate Delhi (from 1784), and the Marathas' collapse owed as much to the Nana–Mahadji rivalry, the deaths of both leaders (1794, 1800) and the Holkar–Scindia feud as to the treaty itself.