Nationalism Without a Nation in India by G. Aloysius

Author:G. Aloysius [Aloysius, G.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Asia, India & South Asia
ISBN: 9780195646535
Google: AlqLgSsDYQcC
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 1998-03-14T18:30:00+00:00

those supporting congruence under colonial circumstances tends to be exaggerated, the primary contest however remains within culture in the realm of how the nation is to be constituted. The external struggle, its form, duration, nature, and intensity are not unrelated to the basic internal struggle. In this sense, it is poor theorizing, firstly, to club together pre-modern quasi-national movements with modern nationalism and describe all of them as manifestations of primordialism ; and secondly, to describe in monolith fashion modern nationalisms of particular geographic regions, or epochs of history, as either cultural or political. It is also inaccurate to set up an entirely new category called colonial nationalism as a sub-monolith outside the general theoretical framework. The variable and contesting nature of modern nationalist ideologies had been pointed out by Carlton Hayes, who found that the so-called political nationalisms of the West, from a different perspective and at certain phases, presented themselves as cultural, and that cultural-national chauvinisms are certainly related to their own internal struggle for power-distribution. 8

‘Nationalism is a doctrine invented in the West’ asserted Khaddourie. Scholars before and after him have taken this for granted, and within the subcontinent too, this is being repeated ad nauseam, both in and out of context. What however this scholarly insight of apparent consensus ignores is the crucial distinction between form and substance in nationalism. If by nationalism is meant the style of thought, its terminology, its formulation including the historically specific form of the nation-state with all its formal paraphernalia, then it was developed in the West. If however nationalism means the coming together of culture and power, a kind of social and societal change in which ascription is challenged and the social power balance in general is tilted towards the hitherto excluded masses within culture, and also an aspiration of cultures for recognition and self-determination then nationalism is neither an invention of the West nor its monopoly domain. Complex agrarian cultures everywhere, to a greater or lesser degree, within their own space and time specificities have expressed both these tendencies of cultural assertion and power homogenization

8 C Haves (1931) notes the simultaneity of waning of liberalism with the waxing of nationalism, p. 163 ff.

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