Smash The Place

Title

Chatterjee, Partha. The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993.

Field

Postcolonial Asian American Studies

Summary

The Nation and Its Fragments begins with a discussion of Anderson’s Imagined Communities – while Chatterjee agrees with the main argument of Anderson’s work (the historical naturalization of the nation through forms of imagining it into existence), it is with the positing of a modular spread of the imagined nation from the West to the rest that this books takes issue. Chatterjee asks in his introductory title, Whose Imagined Community? and objects, “Even our imaginations must remain forever colonized.” (5) The body of the rest of the book is a critical look at the history of nationalist movements in the subcontinent, focusing on examples from Bengal, with the argument that rather than a modular form imported from Europe at the birth of the nation in 1947 (post WW as Anderson suggests) “anticolonial nationalism creates its own domain of sovereignty within colonial society well before its political battle with imperial power.” (6) The reason this is “pre-history” of nationalism is missed is precisely because of the conditions of understanding the nation solely through public, political action. In the case of the colonial nationalism, the domain of public and private are maintained as separate as a strategic anti-colonial move to assert the very possibility and necessity of the sovereign Indian nation. This is an outcome of the logic of colonial difference. Colonial rule is justified through the irreconcilable difference between the colonizer and the colonized – but as such, the project of modernity (predicated on the modern, democratic state) could never be realized. Further, in anti-colonial struggle, the colonized must accept the terms of modernity because of their struggle against domination. But reason and modernity (or the lack there of) were the very terms of colonial domination over the subcontinent – as such, difference had to ratified as positive, if not in the necessarily modern public sphere, at least in the superior, authentically “Indian” inner space of the nation. “Here [in colonized society] for the colonized to allow the intimate domain of the family to become amenable to the discursive regulations of the political domain inevitably meant a surrender of autonomy. The nationalist response was to constitute a new sphere of the private in a domain marked by cultural difference: the domain of the ‘national’ was defined as one that was different from the ‘Western.’ The new subjectivity that was constructed here was premised not on a conception of universal humanity, but rather on particularity and difference; the identity of the ‘national’ community as against other communities. In this aspect of the political domain, then, the hegemonic movement of nationalism was not to promote but rather, in a quite fundamental sense, to resist the sway of modern institutions of disciplinary power.” (75)

The book goes on to deal with the negotiations over this dualism in the imagining of the nation and further to “trace in their [elite and subaltern politics] mutually conditioned historicities the specific forms that have appeared, on the one hand, in the domain defined by the hegemonic project of nationalist modernity, and on the other, in the numerous fragmented resistances to that normalizing project.” (13) These fragmentary resistances and problems of normalization of nationalist modernity are discussed through readings of Bengali popular drama, a close examination of the Bengali middle class as agents of the project of nationalist modernity (and indeed, the architects of the division between home and world as preservation of a crucial cultural difference from the West), and the writing/imagining of a cohesive, “true” classical history as a rooted justification for independence. As Chatterjee recounts the majoritarian writing of this history, he mentions the fragments that have been left out, but nevertheless remain conspicuous in their absence – Muslims, women, lower castes, etc. The following chapters deal with these groups and the politic of their omission and/or simultaneous folding into the narrative of the cohesive nation. Chatterjee discusses women and the nation by speaking on both women’s education reform and the memoirs written by educated women themselves on their own relationship to their new position in the home and world. In speaking on the push for women’s education by nationalists, “the new patriarchy advocated by nationalism conferred upon women the honor of a new social responsibility, and by associating the task of female emancipation with the goal of sovereign nationhood, bound them to a new, and yet entirely legitimate subordination.” (130) The new nation, in negotiating its own forms of modernity, community, citizenship, etc. based on cultural difference (a condition of its postcoloniality) institutes new/old forms of subordination, policing, and exclusion. Chatterjee’s discussion of peasant insurgency draws much from Guha’s work on the same topic, but is mostly a call for a critique of the disciplinary strictures of history – “the task is to ground one’s historical consciousness in the immanent forms of social development that run through Indian history and from that standpoint to engage our colonial experience in a process of struggle – negating and superceding that experience by appropriating it on one’s own terms.” (168) In discussing caste, Chatterjee charts the changing ways caste signifies difference and is mediated/contested in the realm of the private or the realm of the state. Finally, in moving towards a discussion of capitalism and the modern nation-state, he discusses planning and the nation in terms of a Gramscian model of passive revolution being “the general framework of capitalist transition in societies where bourgeois hegemony has not been accomplished in the classical way.” – that is, in India. (212) He says, “ What I have tried to show is that the two processes – one of ‘rational’ planning and the other of ‘irrational’ politics – are inseparable parts of the very logic of this state that is conducting the passive revolution. The paradox in fact is that it is the very ‘irrationality’ of the political process which continually works to produce legitimacy for the rational exercise of the planner. While the planner thinks of his own practice as an instrument for resolving conflict, the political process uses planning itself as an instrument for producing consent for capital’s passive revolution.” (219)

This discussion of capital culminates in a really nice circling back to a discussion of community (not so much nation, but community) and the impossibility and yet irrepressible nature of community in the capitalist state. “The possibilities of opposition as well as encapsulation [of civil society and the state] arise because the concepts of the individual and the nation state both become embedded in a new grand narrative: the narrative of capital. This narrative of capital seeks to suppress that other narrative of community and produce in the course of its journey both the normalized individual and the modern regime of disciplinary power.” (234) Community is the problem and the solution, I guess, in a way. The anti-colonial nationalist stakes its claims on community, but in making it part of the inner outer thing, domesticates it into new forms of domination. But community, predicated on love, desire (yes, he uses these words – it’s not just my silliness creeping in) refuses – and at the same time, in dealing with this refusal, we get to the problems, I think, of multiculturalism, minoritarian struggles, etc. It’s really pretty awesome. I like this book a lot (this is really my other notes part – it is bleeding into my summary, just like all those fragments of the nation…) I definitely think the arguments are strongest in the chapters on women and the nation, less so in the caste (but this could be because I don’t know that much about the caste struggles he is talking about), and really fit into this critique of capitalism he brings out at the end of the book. Good stuff.

Keywords

Indian History, Nation, State, Inner, Outer, Home, World, Fragment, Struggle, Power Relation, Discourse, Critique, Modernity.

Other Notes

“What I attempt is instead a series of interventions in different disciplinary fields, localized and bound by their own historically produced rules of formation, but thematically connected to one another by their convergence upon the one most untheorized concept of the modern world – the nation.” (xi)

“History, it would seem, has decreed that we in the postcolonial world shall only be perpetual consumers of modernity.” (5)

“Here lies the root of our postcolonial misery: not in our inability to think out new forms of the modern community but in our surrender to the old forms of the modern state. If the nation is an imagined community and if nations must also take the form of states, then our theoretical language must allow us to talk about community and state at the same time. I do not think our present theoretical language allows us to do this.” (11)

“Hegemonic power is always a combination of force and the persuasive self-evidence of ideology. To the extent that the persuasive apparatus of colonial ideology necessarily and invariably fails to match the requirements of justifying direct political domination, colonial rule is always marked by the palpable, indeed openly demonstrated, presence of physical force.” (56)

“The search for a postcolonial modernity has been tied, from its very birth, with its struggle against modernity.” (75)

“In the meantime, the struggle between community and capital, irreconcilable within this grand narrative, will continue. The forms of the modern state will be forced into the grid of determinate national identities. This will mean a substantialization of cultural differences, necessarily excluding ‘minorities’ those who would not conform to the chosen marks of nationality. The struggle between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ nationalism will be played out all over again.” (238)

Other QE Works Cited

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. (Postcolonial Asian American Studies)

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. Can the Subaltern Speak? (Postcolonial Asian American Studies)