FOUNDATION OF GOKHALE'S NATIONALISM: BETWEEN NATION AND EMPIRE.

My research wants to be a contribution to the intellectual history of colonial India for the period between 1870s and 1915. Special reference is made to the idea of the nation conceptualised by Gopal Krishna Gokhale (1866-1915), important leader of the Indian National Congress. Gokhale is a pivotal figure in the political history of India, because he was one of the first intellectuals and politicians to frame a modern and secular concept of the nation and to use the platform of the Congress to familiarise Indians with that same concept. This work is an attempt to reconstruct Gokhale's liberal and political nationalist ideology and insert it within the debate that animated Indian colonial society. It will be shown that the anti-colonial movement was a multifarious phenomenon and that those political discourses that opposed more vigorously the British rulers did not necessarily advocate inclusion and freedom for the Indian nation.