Features: Magazine | Literary Review | Life | Metro Plus | Open Page | Education Plus | Book Review | Business | SciTech | NXg | Friday Review | Cinema Plus | Young World | Property Plus | Quest | Folio |

Cultural Studies

The theme of the conference was Nation and Imagination, obviously, a take-off from Benedict Anderson’s characterisations of nations as imagined communities. At this point of time it is difficult to write about Nation and Nationalism in an unproblematic way. These concepts have helped, at least in the initial stages of State formation in different parts of the world, by building solidarities across differences of ethnicity, tribe, race, religion and language, and were instrumental in mobilising people in former colonies in their struggle against imperial domination, leading to the liberation of a large number of countries and accelerating the process of decolonisation. However, a narrow and reductive concept of nation and nationalism has played havoc in a large part of the world in the last century, causing untold miseries to people. India, Pakistan, Ireland, Sri Lanka, the Koreas, the Vietnams, Yugoslavia, Iraq — the list is endless.

Though some contributors to the anthologies would like to push the genealogy of nation as far back as the Elizabethan period, citing the famous speech of John Gaunt in Shakespeare’s “Richard II” as one of earliest articulations of nationalist feelings, and some would like to go even further back in history, the general consensus is that nation was imagined in definite contours only in the 18th century when many nation States emerged in Europe. Then on, the march of nationalism across the globe and its consequences have been charted in many of the essays, with varying degrees of depth and emphases. Though various thinkers like Ernst Renan, Anthony D. Smith, Edward Said, Eric Hobsbawm, Partha Chatterjee and so on have been invoked, it is the shadow of Benedict Anderson that hovers over many articles, and quite reasonably so. His book Imagined Communities had certainly prompted fresh thinking on the issue and set the terms for contemporary debate. Of course, the rather poetic title of the book sometimes leaves an erroneous impression in many that nations are mere mental constructs rather than physical or territorial entities. They forget that Anderson’s book has a hard, pragmatic core as well. Several contributors engaged with Anderson’s formulations, pointing out their validity only in the specific contexts of Europe or the West. In this context Partha Chatterjee, one of the most sustained thinkers on Indian nationalism, has been invoked, who had perceptively remarked: if nation had been thus imagined in the West already, what did the nationalisms outside the West have left to imagine?

What must be acknowledged in any articulation or meditation of nation on a global scale is the fact that it cannot be defined in any ultimate or universally valid way. Nations across the world emerged out of specific historical conjunctures and socio-cultural contexts, and need be understood as such. “The 196 nations of the world perhaps show as many different ways of how a nation is imagined, conceived, born, narrated and constituted …” remarks Harish Trivedi in the introduction to one of the volumes. This is further amplified in the keynote by Aijaz Ahmad who drew attention to the peculiarities of “Indian” nationhood where, “cultural life and political imagination (of the people) are not held together by a common language, a shared religion or a primordial myth”. Rooted in its own history, pre-colonial and post-colonial, and its tradition, it is so incredibly complex that neither the Euro-American nor the postcolonial theorisation can adequately account for it. The necessity of articulating nationalism in all its heterogeneity has been eloquently argued by Gayatri Spivak, Helen Tiffin, Tim J Cribb and others. While writing about nationalism and its different manifestations, its discontents in terms of exile, displacement and diaspora have also been rigorously explored and debated by several contributors. Apart from the erudite articles, one of the volumes features a lively and spontaneous “conversation” among Vikram Seth, Meenakshi Mukherjee and Shirley Chew, where Vikram Seth speaks about his sense of belonging to different places, his art, characters that crowd his literary canvas, and the multiple genres that he straddles effortlessly.

Though each one of the three volumes has been conceived as having a distinct focus, there is a certain amount of overlap which was, perhaps, inevitable. The articles are a mixed bag. Though a majority of them are of very high quality, there are some, particularly in the volume Focus India that smack of a formulaic approach. The contributors seem to begin with a preconceived hypothesis or some formulations drawn from some theorist and then try to impose them on their readings of literary texts. In the same volume, which is not as good in production quality as the other two, the spelling of Sahitya Akademi appears in several variants.

M. Asaduddin, author, translator, critic, is a professor of English in

Printer friendly page  
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail