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34 DR. BABASAHEB AMBEDKAR : WRITINGS AND SPEECHES
bound to produce a common type. Partly are these common features to be explained as the remnants of a period of religious amalgamation between the Hindus and the Muslims inaugurated by the Emperor Akbar, the result of a dead past which has no present and no future.
As to die argument based on unity of race, unity of language and inhabiting a common country, the matter stands on a different footing. If these considerations were decisive in making or unmaking a nation, the Hindus would be right in saying that by reason of race, community of language and habitat the Hindus and Musalmans form one nation. As a matter of historical experience, neither race, nor language, nor country has sufficed to mould a people into a nation. The argument is so well put by Renan that it is impossible to improve upon his language. Long ago in his famous essay on Nationality, Renan observed :—
“that race must not be confounded with nation. The truth is that there is no pure race; and that making politics depend upon ethnographical analysis, is allowing it to be borne upon a chimera .. . Racial facts, important as they are in the beginning, have a constant tendency to lose their importance. Human history is essentially different from zoology. Race is not everything, as it is in the sense of rodents and felines.”
Speaking about language, Renan points out that:—
“Language invites re-union; it does not force it. The United States and England, Spanish America and Spain speak the same languages and do not form single nations. On the contrary, Switzerland which owes her stability to the fact that she was founded by the assent of her several parts counts three or four languages. In man there is something superior to lauguage,—will. The will of Switzerland to be united, in spite of the variety of her languages, is a much more important fact than a similarity of language, often obtained by persecution.”
As to common country, Renan argued that:—
“It is no more the land than the race that makes a nation. The land provides a substratum, the field of battle and work ; man provides the soul; man is everything in the formation of that sacred thing which is called a people. Nothing of material nature suffices for it”
Having shown that race, language, and country do not suffice to create a nation, Renan raises in a pointed manner the question,