ENG615

Partha Chatterjee:
Whose Imagined Community?
 Nationalism:
• Western Nationalism: • Earlier Models:
• Modular forms, through print-capitalism • European
• Official Nationalism: (1820 onwards) • American
• Reaction to Popular Nationalism • Russian
• Merged Nations and Dynasties
• 20th Century Nationalism
• Systems like election, parliament, party
organizations are modelled on popular
nationalism of 18th C Europe
• Post-colonial Nationalism:
• A threat?
 Whose Imagined Community?
• Borrowed from Europe: • The Nation and Its
Fragments: Colonial
• What else is left to imagine? and Postcolonial
• Nationalism in the colonies are premised on Histories (New Jersey:
Princeton University
• Difference Pres, 1993), pp. 3–13.
• Opposition
• This claim dismantles Anderson’s or the
standard definition of nationalism as solely
political.
• Ant-colonial Nationalism is significantly
different from Political/Official Nationalism
 Genealogy of Nationalism
• 21st C. Nationalism: • Chatterjee
• Emergence of Nationalism in post-Soviet era
• Socialism as a threat is now replaced with nationalism
• Gained notoriety even before it fully developed
• 1950s: A feature of anti-colonial struggle
• Soon, it’s emancipatory aspects are undermined
• 1970s: A matter of ethnic politics
• The reason why people in Third World kill
• Gandhi, Ho Chi Minh and cult nationalists:
• Appropriated by interest groups
• Western people felt nothing good about it
 Nationalism: A European Import
• Nationalism is now a Third World Product • Summarizes Anderson
• Like drugs, illegal immigration, terrorism • Confined in academia
• But, it was Europe’s gift to the world • Objection: what is left for us
• The two Wars: Europe’s failure to manage its ethnic nationalism
to imagine?
• Our nationalism is a
• Western amnesia of the origin of nationalism caricature?
• Eastern scholars never forgot how it to the colonies
• Doesn’t blame Anderson
• Benedict Anderson: • We have taken claims of
• Nations were not the determinate products of given sociological nationalism to be a
conditions such as language, race, or religion. political movement
• Nations had been imagined into existence.
• Print-capitalism: Institutional forms through which this imagined
community came to acquire shape
• European, Russian, American nationalisms provided modular forms for
all subsequent nationalisms
 Contextualizing Nationalism
• 1885 formation of Indian National Congress • Chatterjee: 217
• History proper identifies this as the beginning of
Indian nationalism
• Coincides with social reform and modernization
projects inspired by enlightenment
• This history converges with Anderson’s
formulations
• Nationalism’s autobiography, as history, is
fundamentally flawed.
Anti-colonial Precedes Political Nationalism
• Sovereignty within Colonial Society • Spiritual domain refuses to
be controlled by colonial
• Long before it begins its battle with Imperialism powers
• Divides social institutions into two domains: • Colonial interventions into
• Outer: material, of economic, statecraft, science and technology national culture is met with
which is dominated by the West strong resistance
• Studied and replicated • Colonial state is kept out of
the inner domain
• Inner: spiritual, essential marks of cultural
• Doesn’t mean spiritual
identity domain was left unchanged.
• Distinctiveness is preserved and nurtured
• Fundamental feature of African and Asian anti-
colonial nationalism
 Sovereign Nation::Colonized State
• “Modern” national culture in the inner/spiritual • Through different
domain is not Western institutions, colonial
power can control the
• Nation as an imagined community finds its state apparatus, but not
manifestation here the collective cultural
consciousness of the
• Conventional history misses the dynamics in the people colonized.
formation of cultural nationalism, which is not
modelled on the western frameworks.
• Bengal:
 Nationalism in Colonial Bengal
• Simple transposition of Anderson’s “print- • European literary
capitalism” did not happen in specific colonial standards considered
contexts in India. to be inappropriate
• East India Company and the Missionaries produced to judge Bengali
the first Bengali books by late 18th C. literary productions
• English displaced Persian in the administration
• Bengali intellectuals developed and equipped the
Bengali language which became an adequate
language for “modern” culture by mid-19th C.
• The inner domain of Bengali cultural identity
formed and declared its sovereignty over language
• Colonial power had no access to it
 Bengali Drama & Novel
• Modern Bengali drama: mid-19th C. • The Family
• Modern European Drama • Religious Beliefs
• Forgotten Sanskrit Drama (orientalist scholars restored • Status of Women
for classical excellence • None of these were
• Fail to meet the standards provided by modular literary influenced by Western
forms from Europe models

• Novel: similar models (European and Sanskrit) • The Inner Domain was
Uninfluenced by
• Secondary schools provided the space outside the Western Nationalism
domain of the state where cultural nationalism found its
future agents.
• These agents later on further developed in Calcutta
University
 Bureaucracy and Legal System
• Could they be allowed to try Europeans? • Here lies the root of our
post-colonial misery:
• Should they take same exams to enter civil not in our inability to
service? think out new forms of
the modern community
• Could native newspapers exercise free speech? but in our surrender to
• Doesn’t nationalism demand equality in the the old forms of the
domain of the state? modern state.
• If a nation is an imagined community and if a
nation takes the form of state, then our theoretical
language must allow us to talk about community
and state at the same time.
• It doesn’t.