Review: Analysis of The Nation and its Fragments

                                                

                                               Analysis of The Nation and its Fragments

Chatterjee, the author of the Nation and its Fragments, confronts the remnants of imperialism in eastern societies, primarily India. He suggests that the “imagined” nationalism present in late 19th century India was a result of the colonial tenants used by Europeans on exploitative quests throughout the Eastern region. What’s apparent in this book Is Chatterjee’s view on the unexpected results of racial and cultural rejection on the Indian people; and how they responded to a century of this viciousness with a renewed pride in their origins, culture, languages, and faiths. He writes, “Most of the economic institutions of capitalism in India today, such as commodity production, trading and banking capital, methods of accounting, a stock of educated expertise and mercantile groups that would ultimately become industrial entrepreneurs, emerged in the precolonial period.” (Location 745) He is suggesting that not only did the people of India begin to become entrenched in parts of the colonial process besides peasantry, but that they were also maintaining and protecting and imagined space where they could celebrate those parts of their culture that were shunned but not erased by colonialism. “So did many of the political and cultural movements, including the rise of intermediary groups between townsmen and the countryside, the formation of regional cultures, movements for cultural reform and self-respect among deprivileged groups, and even the politics of ‘communalism’”. (Location 747)

Chatterjee proposes that nationalism is seen to some as primitive and resistant to civil Evo liberation; as a view that rejects colonial and imperialistic interests, assimilation, and permanent relegation to second class for people in their own land. Not quite as a stateless nation, because the land once belonged to them; but a powerless nation, nevertheless. However, he also suggests these nationalist attitudes which became prevalent in late 19th century India may have led to the semi-assimilation of those with the opportunity for class elevation. In one example he asserts, “It is also not often remembered today that the two greatest wars of the twentieth century, engulfing as they did virtually every part of the globe, were brought about by Europe’s failure to manage its own ethnic nationalisms.” (Location 168) He adds in another example, “Benedict Anderson demonstrated with much subtlety and originality that nations were not the determinant products of given sociological conditions such as language or race or religion; they had been in Europe and everywhere else in the world, imagined into existence.” So, those native to Eastern countries, content with succumbing to colonialism as long as they did not succumb to peasantry, held on to imperialistic European societal impositions, along with some their cultural practices, and used them to rule citizens in their post-colonial regimes. The author poses the question of whether these communities are actually “imagined”, or if they are mirroring societies created and directed by Europeans and their desires, rather than those of the natives of India.  He contends that “even our imaginations must remain forever colonized” and that the use of nationalism with respect to politics, is the aspect of nationalism that makes imperialist uncomfortable. (Location 193) 

Chatterjee implies that there are different stages of nationalism, possibly relevant to different time periods or contrasting different social issues. Some of these periods he mentioned, such as the social reform of the late 19th century in India, and the modernization of customs brought about during the enlightenment period in India, as precepts to the emergence of nationalism among the natives of that region because colonialists were still influential in government. This is how Chatterjee sees the budding process of nationalism in post-colonial societies.  He emphasizes that, “the greater one’s success in imitating Western skills in the material domain, therefore the greater the need to preserve the distinctness of one’s spiritual culture.” (Location 214) This implies that nationalism may have been a cultural response by the Indian people to the demonizing practice of reducing their culture while relegated in a European dominated society.