In this element, an effort will be undertaken to understand the concept of Orientalism and the question of modernity and its colonial roots in India. This is a relatively new field that has opened up new questions and has significantly reconstituted the old field of colonial history, both for the ex-colonized societies as well as of the colonizers themselves. The history of Europe too, is now increasingly marked through an awareness of the methods in which the colonial encounter crucially shaped the self-image of Europe itself. We will mainly be concerned, though; with the history of the Indian subcontinent.
Although the stage will be concerned with the debate on the colonial era, it is necessary to understand that it is a field that is irrevocably constituted through the present context. In the last few decades, particularly since the 1980s, this field has given rise to a whole new body of work and serious, often extremely sharp debates in the middle of scholars. It was throughout this era that an intense and fresh engagement with the whole question of our colonial modernity came to the fore. What is crucially significant in relation to the development in the scholarship on the Indian subcontinent is that it focuses, unlike earlier writings on colonial history, on the politics of knowledge implicated in that history. In an extremely important method, it foregrounds the manner in which our knowledge of 'our own' history - and our own selves - is framed through and understood through categories produced through colonial knowledge.
Before we go into a discussion of our actual subject matter, let us create a preliminary observation. Indian history today is no longer what we have recognized it to be so distant from our history text-books. The new growths have illuminated characteristics of that history that were hitherto sheltered in darkness. What do we mean when we say some characteristics were 'sheltered in darkness‘? It is not as though some entirely new 'facts' have been uncovered. New facts have certainly become recognized to us, or recognized facts, often measured unimportant, have acquired new meaning because the method we seem at that history has now changed.
DISSIMILAR STRANDS OF RECENT SCHOLARSHIP
There are at least four dissimilar strands of scholarship that have come jointly since the 1980s, that have been at the root of this transformation.
The Neo-Gandhian Critique
In the first lay, there has been since the early 1980s, the reactivation of an older Gandhian critique of modernity. Central in this strand has been the work of scholars like Ashis Nandy, Veena Das and scholar-activists active in the environment and science movements like Claude Alvares and Vandana Shiva. Much of the critique of this set of scholars has been directed at a critique of science and rationality as the ruling ideological coordinates of modernity, alongside the related notion of development followed through the Nehruvian state. Though not all scholars associated with this strand have an explicitly Gandhian orientation, they broadly extend elements of Gandhi's rejection of contemporary Western civilization and its faith in science and cause as the circumstances of human freedom. Ashis Nandy directed his main attack on this ideological constellation of modernity; namely the constellation of science, cause and development. He also extends that critique to the nation-state itself, which he sees as the institutional embodiment of modernity, as an institution that is always intolerant of popular beliefs and methods of livelihood. Nandy sees in the project of the contemporary nation-state, an inherent drive towards homogenization, towards cultural genocide and the desire to reduce life to a few, easily definable and negotiable categories. His central argument in this respect is that notions of the self in the South Asian context have been mainly fluid and it is only with the onset of the contemporary nation-state that the attempts have been made to fix identity into singular categories like Hindus and Muslims. He points to the information that even today, there are hundreds of societies who combine elements of both Hinduism and Islam and discover it hard to 'classify' themselves in neat and exclusive categories. Such an argument is substantiated, for instance through anthropological surveys through scholars like K. Suresh Singh.
The Subaltern Studies School
The second strand can be recognized in the work of the Subaltern Studies School of Indian Historiography. This school too made its first public appearance on the scene in the early 1980s - although its work began in the late 1970s. This group of historians and some political scientists came from a primarily Left-wing political background and much of their initial work was a continuation of the concerns that they had urbanized through the impact of Maoist political practice in the 1970s. Significant in the middle of scholars of this school were historians Ranajit Guha, Gyanendra Pandey, Shahid Amin, David Hardiman and Dipesh Chakravarty and political scientists like Partha Chatterjee and to some extent, Sudipta Kaviraj. The general thread that links the effort of the early work of the Subaltern historians with that of scholars like Ashis Nandy was a critique of nationalism and nationalist historiography and a concern with popular consciousness. Through a series of volumes published in the 1980s, the Subaltern historians launched a major critique of nationalist historiography which subsumed all histories into the 'History of the Nation'. Through initiating this critique, they sought to recover what Ranajit Guha described ―the small voice of history". They sought to understand what those who participated in the nationalist or peasant struggles in the colonial era thought, why they participated and what were the shapes of their motivation and participation. In other languages, they sought to recover the subjectivity and agency - the autonomy - of the subaltern classes, the word 'subaltern', as several of you would know, comes from the writings of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci. In the early subaltern studies, this term was used to distinguish it from other more restrictive categories like class. 'Subaltern' basically means 'subordinate' and could be used to designate dissimilar types of social, economic, and political subordination. As Guha put it in his "Preface" to the first volume, it would "contain subordination in South Asian society whether it is expressed in conditions of class, caste, age, gender, and office or in any other method.
The Anthropological Studies in the US
The third strand comes from within the field of region studies from anthropologists like Bernard Cohn, mainly situated in the United States. Bernard Cohn‘s work spans a much longer era starting from the mid-1950s. He had been writing on questions relating to colonial knowledge of India and the methods in which this knowledge transformed the extremely society it claimed to revise. His researches also showed how this knowledge‘s constituted political subjectivities in the colonial world. Under his stewardship a whole generation of scholars from the University of Chicago, like Nicholas Dirks, Arjun Appadurai and others worked on the dissimilar modalities of colonial knowledge to illustrate how it was thoroughly embedded in the colonial project and power. It was a knowledge that provided the intellectual justification for Britain's civilizing mission in India, where, in Ranajit Guha‘s languages, "an official view of caste, a Christian missionary view of Hinduism and an Orientalist view of Indian society as a 'static, timeless, spaceless' and internally undifferentiated monolith, were all produced through the complicity of power and knowledge." Approximately the 1980s, this anthropological work gets reconfigured into a dissimilar type of framework that explicitly situates itself within the field of our discussion. In an influential essay published in 1984, "The Census, Social Structure and Objectification in South Asia", Cohn showed, for instance, how the colonial censuses not only produced knowledge in relation to the India and its people, but also produced an India that was not necessarily the India that lived prior to the advent of colonial rule.
Edward Said's Orientalism
Finally, there is the work of Palestinian-American scholar, Edward Said that could be said to have made possible the coming jointly of these dissimilar bodies of work. With the publication in the 1978, of Said's highly acclaimed tract Orientalism, dissimilar efforts to deal with the continuing legacy of the West in the former colonies as well as in immigrant societies in the West received a major fillip. In this tract, which became extremely influential in and approximately the mid-1980s, Said showed how sure constructions of the East or the 'Orient' have been crucial to Europe's self-image. He showed through a reading of major literary texts as well as political documents, parliamentary speeches and such other sources, how the ‗Orient‘ was a peculiar European construction - backward, superstitious, barbaric and irrational on the one hand and exotic and pristine on the other. Said emphasizes, though, that it should not be assumed that "the structure of Orientalism is nothing more than a structure of lies or of myths"; it should be understood as a "body of theory and practice". This body of knowledge, he argues, undoubtedly had an older history, but ―in the era from the end of the eighteenth century, there appeared a intricate Orient appropriate for revise in the academy, for display in the museum, for reconstruction in the colonial office, for theoretical illustration in anthropological, biological, linguistic, racial and historical theses in relation to the mankind and the universe, for instances of sociological theories of development, revolution, cultural personality, national or religious character."
It can easily be seen that all the strands of scholarship had already begun in dissimilar methods to challenge the extremely frameworks of knowledge that had dominated our understandings of our history. With the exception of the early Subaltern Studies school, all the others had explicitly begun asking fundamental questions in relation to the Western knowledge - especially colonial knowledge - itself. Even in the case of the Subaltern historians, their relentless interrogations of nationalist and elitist history-writing and the quest for subaltern autonomy led them eventually to question some of the extremely crucial methods in which nationalism itself was structured through western knowledge. That these dissimilar and diverse strands could come jointly because of another intellectual development in Europe and the United States. This was what is loosely described the post-structuralist current - or what is often loosely termed 'postmodernism - which launched a vigorous internal critique of the whole custom of Western philosophy and metaphysics since the Enlightenment. Though, that is not our immediate concern here and we shall return to some of its more relevant characteristics later. Let us now look at the main contentions of colonial discourse theory.
NATIONALISM AND COLONIAL MODERNITY
While we have delineated the main currents of thought that went into the renewed interrogations of colonial history, our main concern in the rest of the element will be mainly with the work of Subaltern historians and scholars like Kaviraj and Nandy. It is not within the scope of this element to create an assessment of the whole body of work produced under the rubric of Subaltern Studies. What we are concerned with here mainly is the later body of work - what Sumit Sarkar has described the late Subaltern Studies'. For it is there that the concern with Orientalism and colonial discourse acquires it mainly articulate expression. It is there that the mainly sustained and thorough-going examination of both colonial discourse and the peculiar characteristics of what Partha Chatterjee have described "our modernity‖ has been accepted out. Much of the later work of Bernard Cohn himself and his students like Nicholas Dirks and Gyan Prakash too can be said to fall broadly within the similar body of work. In the discussion that follows, we will talk about sure themes that emerge from this body of work, rather than proceed in a strictly chronological order.
We have mentioned that the early work of the Subaltern Studies scholars was concerned with the search for subaltern autonomy; that is, of trying to understand shapes of subaltern consciousness and their divergences from those of nationalist political elites, even when they participate in movements led through the latter. This concern naturally led to explorations of how elite consciousness too is/was shaped in a context of colonial subjugation. It led to an exploration of nationalist discourse, its structure, and assumptions, as well as to explorations of shapes of subaltern consciousness. Two things started becoming apparent in the course of these explorations. First, that nationalism was not basically one monolithic ideological formation that every modem society necessity has. The situation was complicated through the information that societies like India's were inserted into modernity through the agency of colonialism. The desire to be contemporary here was, so, enmeshed with the desire to be free and self-governing; that is be 'Indian'. Early nationalist elite were forced to articulate their politics in a condition of subjugation where they simultaneously aspired to the principles of universal equality and liberty embodied through contemporary thought, and had to spot their variation from the West. Second, as a consequence, it was also becoming apparent that nationalism so, also involved a formidable and creative intellectual intervention, formulating and defending its main postulates in the battlefield of politics, as Partha Chatterjee put it. With the publication in early 1983, of Benedict Anderson's now classic Imagined Societies, the possibilities had opened out for a more sustained investigation of how nations are invented. With the publication of this immensely insightful book, the thought that there is anything natural or eternal in relation to the nations was laid at rest. All nations, Anderson argued, are imagined societies. We should clarify one general misconception here. When Anderson suggests that nations are imagined societies, he does not suggest that nations are so unreal‘ or fictitious‘. On the contrary, he claims, they are real and call forth such passion that people are ready to die and kill for it, precisely because they are brought into subsistence as a consequence of communal imagination.
Nationalism as 'Variation'
Let us now turn to some of the characteristics of nationalism and colonial modernity. Attaining the nationhood and self governance, the nationalists understood, was the only method to be contemporary. That was the method the world they exposed, actually was. The great intellectual question that the nineteenth century intelligentsia had posed to itself was ―why did India become a subject nation? How did a small island nation described Britain attain mastery in excess of this vast landmass?" Their answer, we now know, was that this was because India, on the eve of colonial subjugation, was internally divided. That there were hundreds of dissimilar principalities and quarrels, deep internal divisions like those of caste and it was these that made it impossible for the country to resist colonization. In the contemporary world, these could not continue. If we have to become free, we had to overcome the deep internal divisions and usher in a form of self-government that will recognize its entire people as free citizens. The only method this could be achieved was through the attainment of nationhood, for that was the method contemporary societies lived. Yet, it was something that troubled the emergent nationalist elite. How could they be contemporary and yet not basically ape the methods of the Western colonial masters. Being contemporary and striving for nationhood that is for liberation from colonial rule required the subjugated nation, so, to spot its variation from the rulers. It had to be a modernity that was dissimilar in crucial methods from the baggage of western modernity as they saw it. The search for a dissimilar, Indian modernity was then what animated the discourse of nationalism in India. In his essay on "The Census and Objectification", for instance, Bernard Cohn cited from a 1943 text through Jawaharlal Nehru where Nehru observed: "I have become a queer mixture of the East and the West, out of lay everywhere, at house nowhere... They are both [i.e. the East and the West] part of me, and though they help me in both the East and the West, but they also make a feeling of spiritual loneliness... I am a stranger and an alien in the West... But in my own country also, sometimes, I have an exile's feeling.''
This quotation through Nehru highlights one of the mainly abiding inner conflicts of Indian, but more usually, of all postcolonial nationalisms. If we keep in mind that Nehru was through distant the mainly radical of modernists in the middle of all the nationalists, we can imagine what would have been the situation of other nationalist leaders. In information this is an anxiety that is apparent in the middle of the intellectual elite of Indian society extensive before the formal appearance of nationalism towards the end of the 19th century. Ashis Nandy for instance, showed in an early essay that there was a resurgence of the phenomenon of Sati in Bengal towards the end of the 18th century. Through an examination of statistical proof, he argues that it was only in this era that "the rite suddenly came to acquire the popularity of a legitimate orgy." Before that it had declined considerably in mainly parts of the country. Nandy suggested that it was in "the groups made psychologically marginal through their exposure to Western impact" that the rite became popular. These groups so felt the pressure "to demonstrate to others as well as to themselves their allegiance to traditional high civilization." The Bengali elite being the closest to western get in touch with was, therefore mainly affected through this anxiety to be dissimilar. The question of modernity was of course not yet on the agenda at this time, more to the point, in that respect, is Dipesh Chakravarty's reading of early nationalist tracts in Bengal that concerned domesticity and the location of women. While mainly writers of the latter half of the 19th century were clear that "women of this country" were "uncivilized, lazy, quarrelsome" and. so bad for domestic happiness, due to lack of education, they were also influenced that education itself could produce undesirable traits in women. For education could also create them ―arrogant, lazy, immodest, and defiant of power". This was clearly a fear in relation to the contemporary education and exposure to Western thoughts that was being expressed through the early elite.
Anxieties in relation to the Nation's Women
The concern with women' is apparent in both, Nandy‘s exploration of Sati and Chakravarty‘s explorations of domesticity. It is the 'Women's Question' so, argues Partha Chatterjee, that becomes the location for a major nationalist intervention. Chatterjee explores what he calls the nationalist resolution of the women's question to suggest that the method in which nationalism sought to spot out its variation was through demarcating a sphere of inner sovereignty. What is the nationalist resolution of the women's question? Chatterjee notices that in the last years of the 19th century, with the appearance of nationalism, all the significant questions of social reform centered on the status of women, (like widow remarriage, education of women, against child marriages etc), disappear from public discourse. This happens, he contends, because nationalism starts its journey through demarcating an 'inner' and an outer‘ sphere and declaring itself sovereign in the inner, cultural sphere. In the outer sphere its subjugation is given information, but in the inner domain of civilization it claims complete sovereignty. It refuses to create the question of women a matter of negotiation with the colonial state. On the other hand, it does not basically rest content with the old status of women. It rather embarks on a project of creating a 'new woman', educated, active in public life and at the similar time fully aware of her domestic, womanly duties. This 'inner domain‘ then, suggests Chatterjee, becomes the sphere where nationalism begins to spot its variation from colonial, Western modernity. But through valorizing cultural nationalism was not always being contemporary. In information, as several other studies illustrate the assertion of cultural variation often became a method of relegating questions of internal inequalities flanked by groups to the sphere of the 'unspeakable'. The problem then, Chatterjee suggests is that there appeared to be a contradiction lodged at the heart of the nationalist project: its search for modernity was marked through a thrash about against modernity in some sense. "What was national was not always secular and contemporary, and the popular and democratic quite often traditional and sometimes fanatically anti-contemporary."
Cultural Split and Liberal Thoughts
Sudipta Kaviraj introduces three more motivating characteristics in his delineation of the characteristics of colonial modernity. First, he argues, contemporary colonial education introduced a split in the Indian cultural life, through bringing into being two ―rather exclusive spheres of English and vernacular discourse." The concerns that animated these dissimilar spheres were extremely dissimilar. While the English-speaking world was more concerned with thoughts of individual liberty, those working in the vernacular world were distant less concerned with democracy as a form of government. The vernacular nationalist intelligentsia was more concerned with the problem of "communal freedom of the Indian people from British rule" rather than with that of individual freedom. Indian nationalist elite encountered the great liberal thoughts of equality, freedom, and autonomy in a context of subjugation and were so, more immediately concerned with issues of national sovereignty. They, so, chose to transfer these thoughts into their own concerns. Here, we see the second characteristic: Liberal thoughts, Kaviraj contends, did have ―a deep and profound power in Indian political argument" but this power was not in conditions of implanting liberal thoughts but nationalist ones. This is not a minor or trivial variation but in a sense crucial, for as Kaviraj points out, the thought of equality flanked by nations or societies can be totally blind to the thought of internal equality within the national society. Hence, even somebody like Gandhi could easily justify the caste system while claiming national equality and freedom from the British.
A Dissimilar Sequence and Dissimilar Modernity
This second characteristic, just as to Kaviraj, is also connected to a third: Modernity in India followed an extremely dissimilar sequence from that in the West. Modernity is a historical constellation, Kaviraj argues, that comprises three separate procedures: capitalist industrial manufacture, political institutions of liberal democracy and the emergence of a society where old society bonds' have been mainly dissolved and the procedure of individuation has taken lay. This means that in the lay of old shapes of belonging, there have appeared new interest-based associations.
This is what is described in political theory, the legroom of civil society'. In the historical trajectory of the West, democracy appeared after the other two procedures had urbanized to a high degree. Initial disciplining of the working class, for instance, took lay in a context where there was no possibility of democratic resistance. In information, democratic aspirations were, at least partly, a consequence of the procedure of capitalist industrialization. In India, on the other hand, democracy and parliamentary institutions preceded the other two procedures. Kaviraj links this dissimilar sequence to a type of populist politics that comes to control the political scene in India and several post-colonial countries.
It is this problem that Partha Chatterjee has recently conceptualized in his thought of "political society". Chatterjee argues that what is described civil society in the West is a domain of the individuated, rights-bearing citizen that is governed through rules of free entry and exit and individual autonomy. Non-Western societies, he suggests, are marked through a permanent hiatus flanked by this domain of civil society, which is governed through the normative ideals of Western modernity and the vast regions of society that relate to the developmental state as 'populations' that are subject to the policy interventions through the state. Mere, it is the responsibility of the government rather than any notion of rights that becomes the ground on which claims of these populations are negotiated. We cannot go into a longer discussion of this concept as elaborated through Chatterjee, but it is significant to note that just as to him, one of the crucial defining characteristics of 'political society' is that it is a domain where the thought of a society still holds a powerful sway - as opposed to the individual who is the defining feature of civil society. It is the argument of scholars like Chatterjee and Kaviraj that this peculiar characteristic of non-Western modernity should not be understood as a 'lack' or 'underdevelopment' or as a 'partial modernity'. Rather, they should be seen as the specific method in which modernity in the colonial context came to be constituted. It has a dissimilar history from that of Western modernity and is likely to have a dissimilar future.
NATIONALISM, HISTORY AND COLONIAL KNOWLEDGE
So distant we have talked in relation to the nationalism, assuming that there was one single entity described nationalism - and that was Indian nationalism. As it happens, there was neither a single nationalism, nor for that matter, a single Indian nationalism. We know, for instance, that the Indian National Congress espoused one type of Indian nationalism that we may call secular- nationalism'. We also know that the Muslim League espoused, at least from approximately 1940 onwards, a Pakistani nationalism. This is often referred to as the 'two-nation theory'. This was also propounded through someone like Vinayak Damodar Savarkar who stood for explicitly Hindu-Indian nationalism. We also know for instance, that there was throughout the nationalist era a Bengali nationalism, an Assamese nationalism, Malayali nationalism and such other nationalisms. The question is that if there was an already existing substance/nation described India, how do we explanation for the information that so several dissimilar people saw it in so several dissimilar methods? Sudipta Kaviraj answers this question, in his well-recognized essay "The Imaginary Institution of India", through claiming that the India that we talk of so unproblematically today, was not really a detection; it was an invention! Through calling it detection as Nehru did in his Detection of India, we appear to imply that "it was already there", presumably from time immemorial. If you are asked today to describe what India is, you will mainly almost certainly point to its geographical boundaries stretching from Kashmir to Kanyakumari and Bay of Bengal to the Arabian Sea; you will recount the dissimilar linguistic, religious, caste, and tribal groups that inhabit this landmass. You will also almost certainly say that because of all this India symbolizes a 'unity in diversity'. And yet, what if you are told that before the nineteenth century, nobody exactly knew the physical stretch of this landmass and that our ancestors had no thought of how several societies and religions lived in this land. Nor did they have any thought of how several people there were in each society. What then is the picture of India that you will draw? How did the early nationalists draw the picture of their India?
Construction of India in the 19th Century
Take for instance the information that the first tentative maps of 'India' — the name for India too did not exist at that time - were drawn up through James Rennell, a colonial official in Bengal, flanked by 1782 and 1788. It was only through 1818 that, with the East India Company's annexation of big parts of the subcontinent, that and thought of the geographical stretch of the land began to emerge. It was only in the 19th century that the thought of a geographical entity described 'India' was consolidated. As Mathew Edney's detailed documentation and analysis of the mapping of India argues, "In constructing a uniform and comprehensive archive of India, the British fixed the scope and character of the region's territories. They situated and mapped the human landscape of villages, forts, roads, irrigation schemes, and boundaries within the physical landscape of hills, rivers, and forests. It was also in the 19th century that the first censuses of India were done and only in 1881 that the first comprehensive census took lay. It was then that the thought of the dissimilar societies that inhabited the land became accessible, as also their numbers. But this was not all. It was not basically that the British compiled information in relation to the land in an objective manner. To count and create sense of a vast population of a land like the Indian subcontinent, they had to classify the population into dissimilar groups. As there were no clear-cut notions of society, the British defined them in their own methods for purposes of classification. Big categories such as 'Hindu' and 'Muslim', as well as those of caste (in which they fitted thousands of jatis) were in a sense, colonial constructs, devised primarily for the purpose of census enumerations. It is not as though religious denominations and jatis did not 'exist' before the censuses, but there were big zones of indefinable 'grey regions' that were not easily amenable to classification. These hundreds of categories had to be reduced to a few, easily handle-able, administrative categories. For that purpose their boundaries had to be precisely defined, in doing so, colonial rule actually created new categories, and fixed them in sure specific methods, as a lot of historical work now shows. This is not a matter that we can go into at any length here, but a few points should be noted.
Kaviraj has made a distinction flanked by what he calls 'fuzzy' and 'enumerated' societies. One of the methods in which the extremely act of enumeration and classification transformed the method in which societies exist, is captured through Kaviraj in this distinction. Individuals in pre-contemporary, fuzzy societies did not have a fixed sense of identity but that does not mean that they had no sense of identity. Individuals, he argues, could on appropriate occasions, describe themselves as vaishnavas, Bengalis or maybe Rarhis or Kayasthas, villagers and so on. But none of these would be a complete account of their identity. Each of these could extremely precisely describe their conduct in specific situations but it was radically dissimilar from the identity of contemporary enumerated societies in one method. It was only when one singular identity was fixed that they would begin to inquire, as contemporary societies do, in relation to the how several there were in the world, what was their representation in public institutions, how were they being discriminated against and so on. So, as Dipesh Chakravarty asserts, "through the 1890s, Hindu and Muslim leaders were quoting census figures at each other to prove that whether or not they had received their legitimate share of benefits (such as employment and education) from British rule." In that sense, contemporary notions of majority and minority and such other questions become possible to pose only with the emergence of such enumerated societies. It is from this angle that Gyanendra Pandey contends, in his Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India, that even though there were sectarian conflicts in the middle of Hindus and Muslims before colonialism, they were usually local conflicts with several dissimilar roots. They were not communalism in the contemporary sense because there was no sense of a 'society' in the first lay. At any rate, he argues, there was no sense of an all-India Hindu or Muslim society before colonial practices and knowledge inscribed this variation as essential to Indian society. We can see for instance, that the whole discourse in relation to the Muslim population overtaking the Hindu population could only begin to take form once the thought of a majority and minority was made possible through practices of enumeration and classification.
One of the major facts that emerge then from the discussion of colonial governmental practices is that our extremely thought of India, its geographical boundaries, its population and its cultural composition etc are all shaped through the knowledge produced through the colonial state. What is mainly significant is that all subsequent politics, including nationalist politics, was shaped through this knowledge. In the initial phases of the nationalist movement, it was not really clear what nationalism was all in relation to the. There was a critique of colonial rule, to be sure. But then, this critique was not being mounted on behalf of a clearly defined nation described India. As several studies have shown, there was often a Bengali nationalism or an Assamese nationalism and such others that were the first identifications of the anti-colonial elite. As the thought of India became more entrenched and as its contours became more clearly -defined, nationalism quickly appropriated this India as the ideal candidate for the new nation-to-be.
Nationalist Imagination and Indian History
There was one problem, though. How could a so recent an entity claim to any type of legitimacy as a nation? For the extremely thought of nationhood required that the new political society lay claim to an ancient history. For the big part of the nineteenth century so, we see early nationalists vigorously at work to invent a history of India. As Kaviraj puts, in this era, particularly in Bengal, "history breaks out everywhere". Significant thinkers like Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay proclaim, ―we necessity have a history". Bankim in information, puts it more vehemently that "Even when they go hunting for birds, sahebs [i.e. Britishers] write its history, but alas, Bengalis have no history." Notice that even at this stage, Bankim was only thinking of Bengal and Bengali as his nation; nevertheless the desire to have a history was already powerful." What does this search for history mean? Does it mean that Bengalis or Indians had no past? Certainly that was not the case. But as in all pre-modern cultures, the connection to the past was of a dissimilar type. What is it that made 'history' in the contemporary sense dissimilar from the earlier accounts of the past? If we seem at the accounts that are accessible in the pre-colonial era, they are either accounts of genealogies of kings or they are orally transmitted stories of scrupulous events. For there to be history there had to be a society—an enumerated society - whose history it would be. There had to be a more concretely and rigidly defined sense of a society or a people whose history could then be written. This sense arose only when the thought of 'India' became a tangible reality. Much of the effort of the nationalists of dissimilar hues was directed then at defining the political society such that it could incorporate all the diverse elements within the land described India. And this India had to have a history. Where did the possessions for writing a history of India come from?
Orientalism and the Colony's Self-knowledge
It is well recognized that academic knowledge in relation to the India - its history - was produced through the efforts of the great Orientalist scholars of the late 18th and 19th centuries. The founding of the Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1784, through British Orientalists like William Jones, can be measured as a milestone in this enterprise. 0. P. Kejariwal‘s The Asiatic Society of Bengal and the Detection of India's past for instance document the work of this pioneering institution in the excavation of India's past. You might be surprised to know, as Kejariwal was when he started looking at the work of the Asiatic Society, that till as late as 1834, the names of ancient emperors like Samudragupta and Chandragupta Maurya were not recognized to anybody. He even mentions with some excitement, "I exposed that even Asoka and' Kanishka, not to mention their dynasties, were strange names till the Society's work brought them to light". He goes on to observe that it was astonishing for him to see that even the history of other well recognized dynasties like the Palas, the Senas, the Maukharies, the Valabhies and such others were strange till the 19th century, when the Asiatic Society scholars brought them to light. This is not the lay to dwell on the details of the voluminous work done through Orientalist scholars of the 19th century to unearth the history of India.
What is significant for us to note is that if right upto the 19th century, what we know today as the "ancient nation" of India did not have a clear geographical form, did not have an explanation of the dissimilar cultures and societies that existed in it, did not have a history, then what was it that made possible the story that we know today - that 'India' is an ancient nation, which had an apparent Golden Age in the time of the Gupta and Mauryan Empires, and so on? The point being made here through scholars whom 'we have been discussing above is that India, like mainly other nations is a relatively new and contemporary entity. Like other nations, it is the work of a communal imagination that was at work from the second half of the 19th century onwards, which deftly appropriated the work done through Orientalist scholars, in order to produce the narrative of a great and ancient civilization. This was the nationalist imagination that retrospectively produced a History of the Nation, in which all the separate histories of the dissimilar entities that today form a part of the landmass described India, became reconfigured as the History of India. So when 19th century nationalists like Bankimchandra proclaimed require for history, they were actually proclaiming require for a history of this contemporary, rationalistic type. This is why Kaviraj claims that India was an substance of invention and not a detection, That is why there is something worth thinking in relation to the for instance, in Kaviraj‘s claim that incorporating the history of the Satavahanas or of the Indus valley civilization into a history of 'India' involves a sure disingenuousness. Or, let us say, on the foundation of present geographical boundaries can we then lay claim to the Indus Valley civilization and Mohenjodaro because they fall in present-day Pakistan? In other languages, how legitimate is the effort to claim all past histories as parts of present-day India's national history?
Now, the information that "we did not have a history" before the 19th century should not be understood to mean that 'we' did not have any sense or connection with the past. Nationalists of the 19th and early 20th centuries routinely saw this as a sign of our backwardness, of a 'lack' that showed that we were not contemporary. Here, a significant point should be kept in mind. One of the methods in which post-structuralism has questioned the general sense of Western Rationalism since the Enlightenment is through demanding its notion of 'human history' as a singular and linear development. We know, for instance, that the story of human history as a story of progress from lower to higher shapes has been the foundation of contemporary historical consciousness. Post-structuralism has, in the middle of other things, challenged the thought that there can be only one method - the historical method - of relating to the past. Again, but it is useful to bear in mind that such historical self-consciousness is a feature of modem enumerated societies who require to continuously give definitions of their communal selves to themselves and to others. If pre-modern societies did not require any rational explanation of their past, it was basically because their methods of being in the world did not require them to demonstrate who they are. The notion of time in such societies marks no clear separation flanked by mythical time and existed time. One of the methods in which this understanding of history and historical time has affected lives in the colonies - and continues to do so - is that it institutes a scrupulous historical journey for all societies as though they were a single entity. In that story, Europe appears as the lay where history is, because it is foremost in the level of progress. All societies then become condemned to replay European history on their ground. One of the lessons of the body of work is that we have to begin writing our own histories, not through rejecting Europe but through denying it and its history the universal status that it has acquired.
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