{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.028354430379746835, 'fraction_numerical': 0.0020253164556962027, 'mean_word_length': 5.175, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Re-addressing the Cast of Nation, Gender and Desire in Anandamath

To look at the construct of "nation" in conjunction with the categories of gender and desire is inevitably to grapple with issues of identity, agency, and interest along the twin axial scales of the personal-political and the individual-collective. This essay attempts to morph the graph of the Nation in Anandamath into a plot of multiple desires. It engages with some of the "personationalities" of desire that find graphic relief in the novel, especially with a view to tease out their gender implications. Bankim's Anandamath represents a narrative project wholly dedicated to the oracular vision spelt out in its title. "Anandamath" or "Abbey of Bliss" (as translated into English by Naresh Chandra SenGupta) is simply the ideal Indian nation. 1 The manner in which the phrase comes to embody the vision, however, is far from simple, for "Anandamath" is not just a trope that proleptically imagines the nation. In the novel, "Anandamath" is also the idyllic hideout of the revolutionaries in that its secret location in the heart of the jungle, its complete inaccessibility to strangers, its aura of mystique, of almost sacral inviolability, effectively rehearses the grammar of Hindu temple architecture where the garbagriha (sanctum sanctorum) is likewise situated deep in the recesses of the building, sheltering the principal deity from the profanity of any casual sighting. Conflating idioms of the political and the religious, that is, "Anandamath" functions not only as a concept ripe for ideological mobilization towards a desirable future but equally as a site and experience of lived reality set for amplificatory replication in a desiring present. Since the Santan hideaway is also described as "a great monastery engirt with ruined masses of stone" (Ghose 484), "Anandamath" signifies additionally as a surviving but largely forgotten relic of the past. The fact that "[a]rchaeologists would