Book reviews and notices

G. ALOYSIUS, Nationalism without a nation in India. Delhi: Oxford

University Press, 1997. xii + 265 pp. Bibliography, index. Rs. 695
(hardback).

Studies of thc national movement in India have for long been the forte
of the historian. This division of labour perhaps reflects processes within
the national movement itself, whereby the ’social’ was sifted from the
nationavhistorical and made synonymous with the essential character-
istics of Indian society. The labours of subaltern historiography pain-
stakingly brought home the folly of this dissociation, showing how the
denial of history to the social was a replication of hegemonic nationalism.
In its quest for forgotten histories, subaltern historiography thoroughly
explored the fragments, relegating, however, the broad patterns and pro-
cesses to history. It was left to a sociologist to bring in a perspective, which
identified broad trends without reifying them, and at the same time, did
not lose sight of the complex specificities which problematised the broad
trends. G. Aloysius’ study provides precisely this perspective to the study
of nationalism in India, combining historical sociology with what he terms
’praxis-oriented sociology’, a praxis guided by the point of view of the
’submerged masses’-the underdog’s point of view which Aloysius
prioritises as ’a valuc in itself.
The prioritisation of the underdog’s point of view provides Aloysius
with a standard against which he measures the claims of nationalism to
have ushered in a ’modern’ socio-political solidarity, i.e., the nation as a
sovereign people bound by a deep horizontal camaraderie rather than
hierarchies of power. Following Gellner’s framework of nationalism as
a congruence of power and culture, Aloysius proposes that nationalism
is characteriscd by the movement and changing nature of power, involv-
ing its democratisation of power such that it no longer resides in structural
hierarchies but is spread out and sharcd evenly across the span of culture.
However, looking at the broad processes of democratisation of power
through struggles, Aloysius points out that unlike the nationalist histor-
ian’s proposition, ’becoming a nation’ did not involve the identification
262/

of a single common enemy, nor did it involve a unified and concerted

effort to overthrow this common enemy in an effort to free the native
culture from the determining influences of foreign domination. Instead,
it involved multiple strands of struggle and nodes of conflict against
deeply entrenched structural hierarchies of caste and feudalism, so that
at each site of conflict the ’submerged masses’ emerged politically as
‘people’.
This internal dimension of the culture-power fusion is what captures
the attention of Aioysius. At these sites of struggle, the nation’s own past
was the ’other’, and the process of becoming a nation involved a dis-

tancing from past forms of unequal and hierarchical distribution of power.

The mobilisation of the people was ultimately directed at breaking free
from structures that excluded them from the arena of public power through
ascriptive hierarchical structures of privileges/liabilities in society and
dynastic rule in polity. The constitution of the nation as the source of a
distinctive identity thus involved a distancing from past forms of unequal
and hierarchical distribution of power, and the transition to the nation
signified the continual movement towards the achievement of this
(egalitarian) social membership. The other dimension of culture-power
fusion in Aloysius’ framework was the external dimension, the transfer
of power to the nation, involving the assertion of distinction and the demand
for self-determination. The analytical utility of the notion of nationalism
as ’culture-power fusion’ becomes evident as it enables the author to

explore the specificities of movement of power within both the dimen-

sions, .,Iz., the homogenisation of power within the nation and the transfer
of power to the nation. The examination of these specificities shows that
the articulation of nation within the two dimensions as well as the ideas
about power-sharing were disparate and contradictory. Now-here is this
contradiction more apparent than in the Gandhian phase, wherein the
mobilisation of the masses was sought to be channelised in such a way
that the monopoly of power of the old dominant order could be retained.
Thus, nationalism in India failed to affirm the aspirations of the masses
for nation-hood-a socio-economically equal form of solidarity/commu-
nity where each constituent element was sovereign. It is here thatAloysius
sees a divergence between the aspirations of the nation and the nationalist
movement. While nationalism sought consummation in the formation of
a state-system that reflected the traditional structures of power and

domination, the nation failed to emergc as a solidarity of sovereign and

self-determined people. The hierarchical values of the past ’having been
taken over by the coercive state apparatus’, the centralising tendencies
 ’263

of the state made themselves manifest ’not so much against the external

enemy, as against own citizens, bccoming increasingly nervous about

its
even minor and marginal struggles against any form of exploitation’.

The value of this remarkable book lies not only in its attempt to offer
a new perspective to the study of nationalism, but also in its bold effort
to give academic credence to the underdog’s point of view. The book

engages with a host of scholarly positions and works. In fact the range
of works it covers is truly extraordinary. The chaptcr entitled ’Nation:
Homogenization of Power Within Culture’ is notable for its discussion
of a large number of socio-cultural and intellectual movements that were
relegated to the ’social’ by the high rhetoric of the religion and culture-
based anti-colonialism of the nationalists. Of relevance to all social
scientists, this is a must-read work for all students and scholars studying
the historical and sociological processes of the formation of the Indian
.

state and nation.

Nehru Memorial Museum and Library UJJWAL KUMAR SINGH

New Delhi

NICHOLAS B. DIRKS, Castes of mind: Colonialism and the making of

modern India. Delhi: Permanent Black, 2002. xiii + 372 pp. Notes,
index.

This book is a good and handy introduction to the study of caste. It docs
not break new ground, but brings together a lot of very useful material
on many of the tried and tested issues of caste scholarship. However, the
author’s stated ambition-to demonstrate that colonialism made caste a
central symbol of Indian society-is quite debatable for at least two rea-
sons. First, as the pages of this book adequately demonstrate, much before
colonial policy became evident in practice, the existence of entrenched
caste identities was widely documented and commented upon (for example,
pp. 23-25). Second, and more importantly, caste is not the unchallenged
central symbol of Indian society today, as the author avcrs in the opening
pages of this book (p. 5). It jostles for suprcmacy with a host of other
issues that are equally prominent. There is religion, there is class, and
thcn there arc regional loyalties, to name but a few. So it is far from true
that caste is the central principle of Indian society today. Castes matter
in certain domains, no doubt, but we should not let our academic special-
isation blur our cognitive assessment of our surroundings.