Prasenjit Duara: On Theories of Nationalism for India and China
Professor Prasenjit Duara is a historian of China & Raffles Professor of Humanities at the National University of Singapore where he is also Director of Asian Research Institute. Among his other books, Rescuing History from the Nation is the first systematic account of the relationship between the nation-state, nationalism, and the concept of linear history. This essay is taken from Tan Chung (ed) IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF XUANZANG: TAN YUN-SHAN AND INDIA. (click the title for the link to this volume)
On Theories of Nationalism for India and China (click title for the full text)
Whereas most nationalists believe that there is a continuous history of the nation from ancient times to the present, identifiable as the history of a self-same people, scholars of nationalism, particularly in the last fifteen or so years, have debunked all such notions of a continuous path as mythical. I am basically in agreement with the scholarly critique of nationalist myths, but the scholarly critique can be equally unhelpful when it denies any historical connection between the modern nation and the historical society from wence it emerges. In this article I want to suggest that these are both complex societies with distinct historical connections to the past, but these connections are not simple and continuous and nor are they singular. Modern Indians and Chinese are heirs to multiple narratives of political community which they have drawn upon and transformed.
Since at least Ellie Kedourie there has developed a tradition in the scholarship of nationalism which rightly debunks nationalist histories for their mythologies and suppressions of uncomfortable events. Alerting us to the self-consciousness of this exercise, Benedict Anderson has recently pointed out the unproblematic way in which Ernest Renan could write about being "obliged to having already forgotten" wars between different polities: and how these wars subsequently came to be written as "fratricides" among fellow Frenchmen (Anderson 1991, 200). While I am sympathetic with the critique of teleology in this literature, I am suspicious of the proposition which often accompanies it: that nationalism is a radically novel mode of consciousness. Suspicious (a) because this position ignores the complexity of the nature of historical memory and causality and (b) because it remains tied to the idea of self-consciousness as a uniquely modern phenomenon. In neither modern nor pre-modern society is it possible to sustain the notion of a unified consciousness presumed by the concept of nationalism.
Two of the most influential recent works on nationalism, by Ernest Gellner (1983) and Benedict Anderson (1983, revised 1991), emphasize the radically novel and modern nature of nationalist consciousness. Both are extremely fine studies and while I agree with many of their insights regarding the reproduction of nationalist ideology, I would like to challenge their interpretation of the nature and history of nationalist consciousness. Both analysts identify national consciousness conventionally as the co-extensiveness of politics and culture: an over-riding identification of the individual with a culture that is protected by the state. Both also provide a sociological account of how it was only in the modem era that such a type of consciousness-where people from diverse locales could "imagine" themselves as part of a single community-was made possible.
Gellner presents the following account of this discontinuity. Pre-industrial society is formed of segmentary communities, each isolated from the other, with an inaccessible high culture jealously guarded by a Gellner's general term for literate ruling elites. With the growth of industrialism, Society requires a skilled literate and mobile work force. The segmentary form of communities is no longer adequate to create a homogenously educated work force in which the individual members are interchangeable. The state comes to be in charge of the nation, and through control of education creates the requisite interchangeability of individuals, The primary identification with segmentary communities is thus transferred to the nation state as the producer of culture (1983). Thus a new type of consciousness, born of an homogenous culture and tied to the state, emerges in a industrial society.
In Anderson's view, nationalist consciousness was made possible with the breakdown of three defining characteristics of pre-modern society: sacred scripts, divine kingship and the conflation of history with cosmology. Together these had made for an unself-conscious coherence in society which broke down with the spread of print media through the engine of the Capitalist market. Print capitalism permitted an unprecedented mode of apprehending time that was "empty" and "homogenous"- expressed in an ability to imagine the simultaneous existence of one's co-nationals. Travel and the territorialization of the faith relativized this community defining it as limited and the decline of monarchy transferred sovereignty to the community To be sure, many of the characteristics of nationalism evolve historically through a succession of modular types of nationalist movements - one of Anderson's most interesting concepts. But he believes, nonetheless, that nationalisms have a defining systemic unity embodied in the unique type of self-consciousness of the people imagining themselves as one (1983, rev. 1991).
Consider first the argument empirically. The long history of complex civilizations such as that of China does not fit the picture of isolated communities and a vertically separate but unified clerisy. We now have considerable research about complex networks of trade, pilgrimage, migration and sojourning that linked villages to wider communities and political structures. We have also had a sense of how, through central place theory, these linkages worked to transmit resources and information though the society, as well as a differentiated picture of what areas, and when these areas, were more or less integrated with the central places of the empire (Skinner 1964, 1977). This was the case as well in Tokugawa Japan and 18th century India (Bayly 1983, Habib 1963). Moreover, even if the reach of the bureaucratic state was limited, notions of the culture-state indicate the widespread presence of common cultural ideas which linked the state to communities and sustained the polity.
It was not only, or perhaps even primarily, the print media that enabled Han Chinese to develop a sharp sense of the Other, and hence of themselves as a community, when they confronted other communities. The exclusive emphasis on print capitalism as enabling the imagining of a common destiny and the concept of simultaneity ignores the complex relationship between the written and spoken word... Read the full article:
