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The Felt Community: Commonalty and Mentality before the Emergence of Indian Nationalism. By RAJAT KANTA RAY. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003. xii, 580 pp. $45.00 (cloth).
Rajat Kanta Ray's new book makes an important contribution to the recent historiography of India. In this book, Ray examines the various social, political, and religious bonds that led to the development of an Indian identity, a "felt community," long before the modern idea of nationalism arose.
Ray focuses on the emergence of a common culture and mentality and the accommodation of many cultures and mentalities within that felt community as much as on politics in examining the development of an Indian felt community.
The author describes the Indian mentality as encompassing both Hindu and Muslim, for the two religious groups coexisted for centuries, in a way not seen anywhere else that Islam had touched. Ray's examination of modern prenationalistic India in religious terms is one of the strengths of this book-very timely, given recent incidents of communal violence in India.
Ray brings into play language as well as religion, beginning with the familiar etymology of the word "Hindu" and moving on to the use of the term "Hindi" to denote not only a language but any person of Hind, the South Asian subcontinent, regardless of religious or linguistic affiliation.
Much of the book concerns...