——_____ Whose Imagined Community? Partha Chatterjee Se Naooam has once more appeared on the agenda of wot ffi Amos every day sat aera pola anaes in Wester sonra declare that ithe cllape of comma (ts the ern hope at they mean prenmably te cllapse of Sve sotalan), the Cipal danger to world peace is ow posed by the feaurgence of nadovalm in dierent par ofthe wort, Sneath dey tnd age a Bhenomenon ass tobe recognsed ay aprblem before ke li the ate peoples bases nt dese wh sho con for i wo be Iiberated from the arcane practices of area specials and made once more a sbject of general debate However, his very mode of return othe agenda of worl pia bas ice 0 me, hopeleuly preuied ibe dicts onthe mie Ine 1930 and 19605 natonatan asl eganed ae fete of he trios ancolonal srogges in Ain and Alten, Bat sna at the ne inasional paces ef economy and pln the pontoon ‘ate were diiplined and normalized uaer the concepaed sabes of “development and modernization’ nal valent blag rele sete domain he arr histori of thi aca tmpite. And in thou peice histories defined by te unprepowea ing contents of colonial archives, the emancipatory aspects of nationalan were undermined by couile Feeliont 0 cee dele Imanipulaons, and the cial pursuit of privat interes yeh 1070 national id become s matter fete pole tne eon yp plein the Third World kiled each esher sometimes in wars beweeh fegular armies, sometines, more dares im crac ad afeh po: tracted civil wars, and increasingly, it seemed, by technologically 24 PARTHA CHATTERJEE m9 sophisticated and virtually unstoppable acts of terrorism, The leaders of the African struggles against colonialism and racism had spoiled their records by becoming heads of corrupt, fractious, and often brutal Fegimes; Gandhi had been appropriated by such marginal cult as paci- fam and vegetarianism; and even fo Chi Minh in his moment of glory was eauyghe in the unvielding polavties of the Cold War. Nothing, it wwould seer, was left in the legacy of nationalism to make people in the Western world feel good about it This recent genealogy of the idea explains why nationalism is now viewed as a dark, elemental, unpredictable force of primordial nature threatening the orderly calm of civilized life. What had once been suc- cessfully relegated to the outer peripheries of the earth is now seen picking is way back foward Europe, through the long-forgotten provinces Of the Habsburg, the tearist, and the Ottoman empires Like drugs, te rorism, and illegal immigration, i¢ is one more product of the Third ‘World that the West dislikes but is powerless to prohibit. In light of the current discussions on the subject it the media itis sur prising to recall that not many years ago nationalism was generally Considered one of Europe's most magnificent gifts to the rest of the World. Itis also not often remembered today that the two greatest wars of the eventieth century, engulfing as they did virtually every part of the lobe, were brought about by Europe's fale to manage its own ethnic nationalisms. Whether ofthe ‘good! variety or the ‘bad, nationalism was tentirely a product of the political history of Europe. Notwithstanding the celebration of the various unifying tendencies in Europe today and of the political consensus in the West as a whole, there may be in the recent amnesia on the origins of nationalism moze than a hint of anxiety about ‘whether ithas quite been tamed in the land ofits birth. ‘In all this time, the “arca specialist’, the historians of the colonial world, working their way cheerlessy through musty ies of administrative reports and official correspondence in. colonial archives in London or Paris oF Amsterdam, had of course never forgotten how nationalism arrived in the colonies. Everyone agreed that it was a European import, the debates in the 1960s and 1970s in the historiographies of Africa or India o Indonesia were about what had become of the idea and who was responsible for it, These debates between a new generation of national- ist historians and those whom they dubbed ‘colonialist’ were vigorous and often acrimonious, but they were largely confined to the specialized. territories of area studies’; no one else took much notice of them, “Ten years ago, it was one such area specialist who managed to raise ‘once more the question of the origin and spread of nationalism in the framework of a universal history. Benedict Anderson demonstrated withPING THE NATION 216 MA sch ube and oii hat atone were ot he dterniae oduct of gen socilogal condtons sich as langage Face Popgion: they hed Deen, Fuope and everywhere es nthe worl Tmagined into exitence! He also described some of the major ins ln forms throu which this magined community came to aequte Concrete shape especialy the insta of what eso ingenious called ‘printeapitalsm’ He then argued that the historical experience of terials in Wester Earope nthe Avereas, nd it Riad p> piled forall subsequent nationalize se of mols orm from whieh Rana ites ata tnd Arica ha osc tones they ike Andersons book has been Ishin, the most nena a the fas Mt of courve i sneedless oad, s confined sinostexchinvel to aca demic witngs, Contary tothe largely uninformed exotiezation of tiaonaiam i the popular medi in the Wea the theoretical tendency represented by Anderson certainly tempts reat the penomenon 3 partof the unveral history ofthe moder word I have one central objection to Anderson's argument. If nationalis the rest f the world have to choose their imagined community from cer- tain ‘modular’ forms already made available to them by Europe and the ‘Americas, what do they have left to imagine? History it would seem, has decreed that we in the postcolonial world shall only be perpetual con- suumers of modernity. Europe and the Amerieas, the only rue subjects of | history, have thought out on our behalf not only the seript of colonial enlightenment and exploitation, but also that of our anticolonial resis tance and postcolonial misery. Even our imaginations must remai forever colonized. T object to this argument not for any sentimental reason, 1 object because I cannot reconcile itwith the evidence on anti-colonial national: ism. The most powerful as well as the most creative results of the nationalist imagination in Asia andl Africa are posited not on an identity Datrather on a differmcewith the ‘modular’ forms of the national society propagated by the modern West. How cap we ignore this without redu- ‘ing the experience of anticolonial nationalism to a caricature of itself? ‘To be fair to Anderson, it must be said that he is not alone to blame. ‘The difficulty, I am now convinced, arses because we have all taken the claims of nationalism to be a politcal movement much too literally and such too seriously In India, for instance, any standard nationalist history will tll us chat nationalism proper began in 1885 with the formation of the Indian ‘National Congress. Ie might also tellus thatthe decade preceding this was a period of preparation, when several provincial pol eal associations PARTHA CHATTERJEE 27 were formed. Prior to that rom the 1820s to the 1870s, vas the period of ‘social reform’, when colonial enlightenment was beginning to ‘mod fernize’ the customs and institutions of a traditional society and the politcal spirit was stil ery much that of collaboration with the colonial Fegime: nationalism had still not emenged. ‘This history, when submited to a sophisticated sociological analysis, ‘cannot but converge with Anderson's formolations, In fact, since it seeks 1 replicate in its own history the history of the modern state in Europe, nationalism's selErepresentation will inevitably corroborate Anderson's evoding of die nadonaist myth. 1uhink, however, that, a history ations alism’s autobfography is fundamentally fawed. By my reading, anticolonial nationalism creates its own domain of sovereignty within colonial society well hefore it begins its political bale ‘with the imperial power. I does this by dividing the world of social inst- tutions and practices into two domains ~ the material and the spiritual ‘The material is the domain ofthe ‘outside’, of the economy and of state- ‘rat, of science and technology, a domain where the West had proved its superiority and the East had succumbed. In this domain, chen, Western saperiority had to be acknowledged and its accomplishments carefully studied and replicated. The spiritual, on the other hand, is an ‘inner’ ‘domain bearing the ‘esential’ marks of cultural identity, The greater ‘one’s success in imitating Western skills in the material domain, there fore, the greater the need to preserve the distinctness of one's spiritual cnloure, This formula is,1 think, a fundamental feanure of anticolonial nationalisms in Asia and Aftica? ‘There are several implications. First, nationalism declares the domain of the spiritual its sovereign territory and refuses to allow the colonial power to intervene in that domain. I may revurn to the Indian example, the period of ‘social refcrm’ was actually made up of two distin phases, In the earlier phase, Indian reformers looked to the colonial authorities to bring about by state zetion the reform of traditional institutions and. ‘customs. In the latter phase, aldiouggh the need for change was not dis- puted, there was a strong resistance to allowing the colonial state to mervene in matters ffe-ting ‘national culture’. The second phase, it my argument, was already the period of nationalism. The colonial state, in other words, is kept ous ofthe ‘inner’ domain of | national culture; but itis not as though this so-alled spiritual domain is left unchanged. In fact, here nationalism launches its most powerful, creative, and historically significant project: to fashion a ‘modern’ ational culture that is nevertheless not Western. Ifthe nation isn ima gincd community, then this is where itis brought into being. fn this, its ‘tue and essential domaty, the nation is already sovereign, even when the state isin the hands of the colonial power. The dynamics of this historical38 MAPPING THE NATION project is completely missed in conventional histories in which the story ‘of nationalism begins withthe contest for political power [wish to highlight here several areas within the so-alled spiritual domain that nationalism transforms in the courte of ts journey. [will confine my itlustations ro Bengal, with whose history Tam most familia, The first such area is that of language. Anderson is entirely correct in hs suggestion that itis ‘printeapitalism’ which provides the new inst tional space for dhe development of the modern “national language. Tlowever, the speuficides of the colonial situation do not allow a simple ransposition of European patterns of development. In Bengal, for instance, itis at the initiative of the Fast India Company and the European missionaries that the first printed books are produced in [Bengali atthe end of the eighteenth century and the first narrative prose compositions commissioned at the beginning of the nineteenth. At the same time, the first half ofthe nineteenth century is when English eon pletely displaces Persian asthe language of bureaucracy and emerges as the most powerful vehicle of intellectual influence on a new Bengali lite. The crucial moment in the development of the modern Bengali language comes, however, in mideentury, when this bilingwal elite makes ita cultural project to provide its mother tongue with the necessary lin {uistic equipment to enable it to become an adequate language for ‘modern’ culture. An entire institutional network of printing presses, publishing houses, newspapers, magazines, and literary societies is cre ated around this time, outside the purview of the state and the European missionaries, through which the new language, modern and standard: ized, is given shape. The bilingual intelligentsia came to think of ts own language as belonging to that inner domain of cultural identiy, from which the colonial intruder had to be kept out; language therefore ‘became a zone over which the nation first had to declare its soversignty and then had to wansform in order to make it adequate for the modern world, Here the modular influences of modern European languages and lit. eranures did not necessarily produce similar consequences, In the case of the new literary genres and aesthetic conventions, for instance, whereas European influences undoubtedly shaped explicit critical discourse, it ‘was also widely believed that European conventions were inappropriate and misteading in judging literary productions in modern Bengal, To this day chere isa clear hiatus in this area berween the terms of academic criticism and those of literary practice. To give an example, let me brictly discuss Bengali drama, Drama is the modern literary genre that is the least commenced on aesthetic grounds by critics of Bengali literature, Yee it is the form it PARTHA CHATTERJEE 219 which che bilingual elite has found its largest audience. When itappeared jn its modern form in the middle of the nineteenth century, the new Bengal drama had two models availabe tot: one, the moxlera European drama as it had developed since Shakespeare and Moligre, and two, the virtually forgotten corpus of Sanskrit drama, now restored to a reputation of classical excellence because ofthe praises showered on i by Orientalist scholars from Europe. The literary criteria that woud presumably direet the new drama into the privileged domain of a modern national cultare were therefore clearly set by modular forms provided by Europe. But ‘he performative practices of the new institution of the public theatre mace it impossible for those criteria to be applied to plays written for the theatre. The conventions that would enable a play to succeed on the Calcutta stage were very different from the conventions approved by eri Jes schooled in the traditions of European drama. The tensions have not bbeen resolved to this day. What thrives as mainstream public theatre in ‘West Bengal or Bangladesh today is modern urban theatre, national and clearly distinguishable from ‘folk theatre’, It is produced and largely patronized by the literate urban middle clases. Yet cei aesthetic eon ventions fail ( meet the standards set by the modular iterary forms adopted from Europe, ven in the case of the novel, that celebrated artifce of the national {st imagination in which the community is made to live and love in “homogeneous time’, the modular forms do not necessarily have an easy passage. The novel was a principal form through which the bilingual elite in Bengal fashioned a new narrative prose, In the devising of this prose, the influence of the co available models - modern English and classical Sanskrit ~ was obvious. And yet, as the practice of the form stined greater popularity, it was remarkable how frequently in the course of their narrative Bengali novelists shifted from the disciplined forms of authorial prose to the direct recording of living speech. Looking at the pages of some of the most popular novels in Bengali itis often difficult ‘o tll whether one is reading novel ora play. Having created a modern prose language in the fashion of the approved medular forms, the Titerati, in their search for artistic truthfulness, apparently found it nec cesary to escape as often as possible the rigidities of that prose, The desire to construct an aesthetic form that was modern and national, and yet recognizably different from the Western, was shown it perhaps its most exaggerated shape in the efforts in the early twentieth entury ofthe so-alled Bengal school of art. It was though these efforts {hat on the one hand, an institutional space was created for the modern professional artist in India, as distinct from the trdlitonal craftsman, for the dissemination through exhibition and print of the products of art and for the creation ofa public schooled in the new aesthetic norms, Yet