Partha Chatterjee has been acknowledged as one of India’s leading political philosophers. He is a member of the subaltern school – a branch of postcolonialism that follows an approach of looking at the non-elite in examining politics and history in former colonial countries. It should be remembered, however, that subaltern discourse does not simply negate the discourse of the colonisers. He is therefore concerned with issues such as gender, class and caste in his work. In The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (1993), Chatterjee examines the development of nationalism in India during the colonial and postcolonial periods.
It is difficult to apply a definition to the term, “postcolonialism”. In turning to The Encyclopedia of Historians and Historical Writing, we are told that “Postcolonialism is an elusive and contested term that refers to the multifaceted project of examining the complex and unequal relationships between European powers and their generally, though not exclusively, non-European subjects before and after formal political independence.” In essence, therefore, postcolonialism in history is about power structures and reclaiming power in the absence of colonial domination. This is a broad project. Indeed, there are a number of origins or theoretical foundations for postcolonial theory that have been put forward. Edward Said in Orientalism (1978) focused on deconstructing binaries such as us/them, modern/traditional, advanced/aboriginal, that had been put in place by colonisers. Given the complex relationship between colonisers and the colonised, we are told that rather than binaries, there is a hybrid relationship between these groups that can lead to new concepts. However, it has been noted that the term “post-colonialism” reorients discourse around another binary opposition: colonial/post-colonial. This approach cannot be universal - a view rapidly gaining ground in the discipline of postcolonial studies is that theories must be tied to specific geographical, social and historical conditions. While many issues such as nationalism, gender and language are raised in nearly every postcolonial context, how the issues are raised and the responses to them differ from region to region.
Partha Chatterjee sets out his goal in writing The Nation and Its Fragments in the preface to the book. He tells us that he seeks to see how the development of the concept of “the nation” has been influenced by a number of fields. The book can be broken into three parts. Chapters one to five trace the development of nationalism in India and show how this is reflected in and encouraged by contemporary historiography. Chapters six to nine look at the marginalised in Indian society and how nationalism impacted on them. Chapters ten and eleven look at the concept of the nation state and the communities within the nation.
Chapter one, called “Whose Imagined Country?” sets out the basic thesis for the book. Chatterjee writes, “By my reading, anticolonial nationalism creates its own domain of sovereignty within colonial society well before it begins its political battle with the imperial power. It does this by dividing the world into two domains – the material and the spiritual. The material is the domain of the “outside”, of the economy and of statecraft, of science and technology, a domain where the West has proved its superiority and the East has succumbed. In this domain, then, Western superiority had to be acknowledged and its accomplishments carefully studied and replicated. The spiritual, on the other hand, is an “inner” domain bearing the “essential” marks of cultural identity.” Chatterjee is apparently creating another binary set of opposing ideologies – material/spiritual. However, he tells us that his approach is much more subtle. His objective is “not only an identification of the discursive conditions that make such theories of Indian exceptionalism possible, but also a demonstration that the alleged exceptions actually inhere as forcibly suppressed elements even in the supposedly universal forms of the modern regime of power.” So Chatterjee is trying to show that out of the dichotomies he surveys, comes a synthesis of modern Indian nationalism.
Chapter two looks at the colonial state, Chatterjee tells us that while the motives of the colonisers came into question, the material benefits were not so hotly debated. “Indian nationalists are not, of course, quite so generous in attributing benevolent intentions to the colonial mission. But their judgment on the historical value of state institutions created under British rule is not fundamentally different.”
Chapters three to five, “The Nationalist Elite”, “The Nation and Its Pasts”, and “Histories and Nations” have been called by one reviewer, “the most brilliantly provocative and original chapters” of the book. Chatterjee in chapter three identifies the elite in Calcutta as being largely responsible for the nature of popular nationalism from the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. “It was [the Calcutta middle class] that constructed through a modern vernacular the new forms of public discourse, laid down new criteria of social responsibility, set new aesthetic and moral standards of judgment, and suffused with its spirit of nationalism, fashioned the new forms of political mobilization that were to have such a decisive impact on the political history of the province in the twentieth century.” He goes on to say that the colonial administration continued to subjugate the elite – not only by way of ideology, but also by force.
Chapter four, “The Nation and Its Pasts”, examines the development of historical scholarship in India. Histories of India written by outsiders were starting to be rejected, Chatterjee tells us, “It is, needless to say, a primary sign of the nationalist consciousness that it will not find its own voice in histories written by foreign rulers and that it will set out to write for itself the account of its own past.”
This theme is continued in Chapter five, “Histories and Nations”, where Chatterjee identifies history itself as a weapon in the nationalist struggle against colonial rule. He tells us that in the late nineteenth century, these were explicitly linked. “…in the 1880s, a number of Bengali writers were announcing quite openly that the struggle for an independent historiography and the struggle for independent nationhood were both to be waged against colonialism.”
The focus of the book then shifts to looking at the underprivileged in society and their place in forming Indian nationalism. Chatterjee looks at women, the peasantry, and the outcasts – in terms of the Hindu caste system. In the case of women’s place in Indian society, Chatterjee suggests that while there was significant protest in the middle of the nineteenth century over the treatment of women (for instance, the practice of sati – the immolation of widows on their husbands’ funeral pyres), by the late nineteenth century these protests had, to a large degree, been silenced. This was, according to Chatterjee, because the role of women had been subsumed into the sphere of spiritual nationalism – a part of the domestic sphere in the world/home dichotomy.
Chatterjee then surveys a vibrant peasant political culture and introduces another dichotomy – that of formal politics/peasant politics.
Chapter nine, “The Nation and Its Outcasts”, looks at the caste system. We see that Indian nationalists had adopted two approaches to dealing with the issue of caste. Some denied the idea that caste was an essential component in characterising Indian society. Others sought to maintain the system as an essential element of Indian society. Again, Chatterjee attempts to find some common ground between two apparently divergent threads. He argues that both accept the premise of modernity – one rejects caste as inconsistent with modern society, the other looks at caste as un-oppressive and allowing individuality to thrive.
In the penultimate chapter, Chatterjee looks at the emergence of India as a nation state. First, he charts the nature of economic planning in India in the years leading up to independence and beyond. He contrasts “rational” planning and “irrational” politics in a country conducting “passive revolution”. In the final chapter, “Communities and the Nation”, Chatterjee looks at the fuzzy concept of communities within India and how the struggle between community and capital will continue for the foreseeable future.
Chatterjee’s book is clever. Perhaps it is a little too clever. It is written for an academic audience that is grounded in the philosophies of G.W.F. Hegel and Antonio Gramsci. It can be dry and over-analytical in employing these philosophies – so the book is not a page-turner. On the other hand, Chatterjee’s thesis that Indian nationalism developed out of a spiritual rather than material sphere is, in itself, compelling. The reader does need a reasonable knowledge of Indian history in order to appreciate Chatterjee’s work (I found myself reaching for general works on Indian history on more than one occasion).
There is also a notable absence in Chatterjee’s work. While he illustrates Hindu/Indian nationalism well, Muslim/Pakistani nationalism is hardly discussed at all. This is troubling because Partition, and the communal violence surrounding it in 1947 (which included the partition of Chatterjee’s home province of Bengal into present-day Bangladesh), is one of the most important events in the history of nationalism on the subcontinent, ranking alongside the Mutiny of 1857. Not to mention the fact that Pakistan and India have gone to war (the most extreme manifestation of nationalism imaginable) against each-other several times since independence, and are both engaged in a nuclear standoff. While Chatterjee does discuss the Mutiny, he frames it as an aborted revolution (he refers to it as the “Great Revolt” ) – perhaps looking at the violence surrounding Partition would negate his insistence that the West is wrong in writing off nationalism as a bad thing. That said, the chapters on the place of history in the development of nationalism were especially good in emphasising the role that history and interpretations of history can play in the forming of a national consciousness. If the reader does not wish to get bogged down in theory, however, he or she may well wish to consider another text on the development of India and Indian national identity such as Judith M. Brown’s Modern India: The Origins of an Asian Democracy (1994).
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