Mazzini’s passion for unification and uniformity actually recommended him to his non-European disciples: fellow exiles and expatriates, in the rest of the world, who grappled with the encroachments of European globalizers on one side the collapse of the authority embodied by their mandarins and Brahmins. These unmoored men, almost all with powerful literary imaginations, saw their own unborn or fallen nations as bursting into the small club of advanced nations in the way Italy had, throwing off the shackles of foreign occupation, corrupt religion and sectarian differences to offer a new vision of humanity.
Savarkar, the chief ideologue of India’s Hindu nationalist movement, emerged from his immersion in Mazzini’s collected works to conclude that Indians, like Italians, ‘were building humanity’. The conservative Hindu thinker Lala Lajpat Rai explicitly identified Mazzini as the founder of a new religion, whose creeds of nationality, liberty and unity were to be practised with blood and martyrdom. Another close reader of the Italian, Bipin Chandra Pal, used him to promote the cult of Bharat Mata (Mother India), revealing an allegedly ancient Hindu idea of the divinized and spiritualized nation, or the nation as mother, to be derived almost entirely from European nationalist notions.
Another devotee of Mazzini was Liang Qichao, China’s foremost modern intellectual, and an inspiration to many writers, thinkers and activists across East Asia. Exiled to Japan in 1898, Liang produced a large inspirational history of Italy aimed at galvanizing his Chinese compatriots. Typically, he placed Mazzini at the centre, minimizing the latter’s differences with Cavour, and his eventual failure and irrelevance. Liang believed at this early stage in his career in the necessity of violence or what he termed ‘destructionism’ for the revival of Chinese civilization: ‘After catastrophes that arise in the cause of liberty,’ he wrote, ‘one can expect to reach modern civilization at some point.’ He was under the impression that Italy by the end of the nineteenth century was a successful nation state with a formidable military and industrial power: ‘the shame inflicted on generations of forefathers is now removed,’ he wrote, ‘and the glory of a 2,000-year-long-history is restored’.
Liang hoped to restage in his own country the glorious resurrection of an ancient civilization. Mazzini also offered to him a model for personal heroism, journalistic fluency and a thrilling revolutionary politics. The Chinese intellectual, exiled like his hero and engaged in futile plots and secret societies, didn’t examine Mazzini’s ideas so much as find reasons in his life for self-exaltation. Eventually, Liang moved on from hazy claims and empty chatter. But by then one of his most devoted readers in the Chinese provinces, Mao Zedong, had inherited Liang’s fascination with revolutionaries who sacrifice themselves and others.
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Mazzini’s magnetic appeal made for an extraordinarily diverse fan base, whose members tended to quickly transcend their religious and ethnic background in their search for philosophies of vitalism and action. In Egypt, the Jewish playwright James Sanua, the founder of modern Arabic drama, transmitted Mazzini’s ideas to Arab nationalists almost as soon as the Italian had formulated them. In the 1870s, Sanua’s close associate, Jamal al-din al-Afghani, the first ideologist of political Islam, established ‘Young Egypt’. Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the intellectual icon of Israel’s settler-Zionists, was briefly the editor of The Young Turk, a newspaper founded by Young Turks shortly after they took power in Turkey in 1908. Jabotinsky credited Mazzini, whose writings he had encountered in the turbulent Italy of the fin de siècle, for giving ‘depth’ to his ‘shallow Zionism’, ‘transforming it from an instinctive sentiment into a worldview’.
A member of Mazzini-inspired ‘Young Bosnia’ assassinated Archduke Francis Ferdinand in 1914, triggering the First World War. Mazzini had his deepest and more enduring influence in India, where his cult far exceeded that of any Western figure, including John Stuart Mill. His books became best-sellers as early as the mid-nineteenth century, and eventually turned into how-to manuals for Hindu nationalists. Secret societies modelled on the Carboneria and Mazzini’s Young Italy arose in Calcutta in the 1870s, providing a ready platform to budding nationalists. As Surendranath Banerjea, known as the Indian Burke, wrote, ‘It was Mazzini, the incarnation of the highest moral forces in the political arena – Mazzini, the apostle of Italian unity, the friend of the human race, that I presented to the youth of Bengal. Mazzini had taught Italian unity. We wanted Indian unity.’
But, colonized by the British, India suffered, more than even Italy, from the disadvantages of incomplete nationality; and its educated elites carried heavier burdens of irresolution – and fantasy. By the late nineteenth century many Hindus, who came from high castes that enjoyed relative power before the British arrived and constituted India’s educated elite, liked to believe that Hindus constituted a great nation by default, and that India was their sacred land.
These pupils of Mazzini belonged to the first and second generation of upper-caste South Asians educated in Western-style institutions in the new cities and towns created by British colonialists. Resentments abounded among these upper-caste Hindus, who had no real power, and were seen by their overlords as backward and effeminate. India’s most famous novelist of the nineteenth century, Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay, typified the tendency to cringe and hate. A high official in the Bengal bureaucracy, he spun garish fictional fantasies about militant Hindu saviours. Anandamath (1882), his most famous novel, describes a band of holy warriors rescuing ‘Mother India’ from barbaric foreign invaders.
Like the early Zionists, who embraced many anti-Semitic stereotypes, these late nineteenth-century Indian nationalists internalized British clichés about Indians as weak, unworldly and unmanly. Longing for martial valour, these men were too fastidiously conscious of their high-born status to turn into a boldly left-wing revolutionary intelligentsia, like the Russian one. The political ideology that seemed a natural fit for these educated, progressive but marginalized Hindus was a radicalism of the right.