Whose+Imagined+Community

SIS 700 Notes: 4 October Chatterjee, Partha Chatterjee challenges Anderson's view of the birth of Nationalism in the colonial world (Note that Chatterjee is talking about the non-settler colonies, such as those found in Africa and Asia). Anderson views colonial states as acquiring nationalism from the Western European tradition. Thus even the nationalist movements that eventually freed the colonial world were actually a gift of the Europeans. For Chatterjee this leaves the post-colonial world as simply “consumers of modernity”. Chatterjee views nationalism as a richer, more universal phenomenon than it is portrayed in Anderson. European nationalism, as is described in Anderson, is only one form of this phenomenon. Other regions supplied their own contributions to the forming of modern nations. Chatterjee primary example is of India. He demonstrates how the rise of the nation did not coincide with that of the colonial state. The state occupied the realm of the “outside,” whereas Indian nationalism's roots are to be found in the “inside” realm. This “inside” realm is one tradition, family and culture. Although the “communities” Anderson speaks of my be synonymous with the “state” in a Western context, this is not the case in the colonial world. Thus it was in this inside realm where communities were imagined first, not in the outside realm. An example of this in the Indian context is the use of the Bengali language in Bengal (Eastern India/Bangladesh). While Chatterjee accepts Anderson's focus on language, in this case it is not the language of the state (English) that influenced nationalism, but an indigenous language. This is a fundamental difference from the European brand of nationalism. In summary, Chatterjee sees most examinations of nationalism as Euro-centric (including Anderson). Nationalism is not a wholly western idea, but it evolved in the colonial and post-colonial world in a manner that in many ways differs from that found in Europe and in its settler colonies (aka. USA, Canada, Australia, etc...)
 * Whose Imagined Community? (1991)**