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The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories
In this book, the prominent theorist Partha Chatterjee looks at the creative and powerful results of the nationalist imagination in Asia and Africa that are posited not on identity but on difference with the nationalism propagated by the West. Arguing that scholars have been mistaken in equating political nationalism with nationalism as such, he shows how anticolonialist nationalists produced their own domain of sovereignty within colonial society well before beginning their political battle with the imperial power. These nationalists divided their culture into material and spiritual domains, and staked an early claim to the spiritual sphere, represented by religion, caste, women and the family, and peasants. Chatterjee shows how middle-class elites first imagined the nation into being in this spiritual dimension and then readied it for political contest, all the while "normalizing" the aspirations of the various marginal groups that typify the spiritual sphere.
While Chatterjee's specific examples are drawn from Indian sources, with a copious use of Bengali language materials, the book is a contribution to the general theoretical discussion on nationalism and the modern state. Examining the paradoxes involved with creating first a uniquely non-Western nation in the spiritual sphere and then a universalist nation-state in the material sphere, the author finds that the search for a postcolonial modernity is necessarily linked with past struggles against modernity.
While Chatterjee's specific examples are drawn from Indian sources, with a copious use of Bengali language materials, the book is a contribution to the general theoretical discussion on nationalism and the modern state. Examining the paradoxes involved with creating first a uniquely non-Western nation in the spiritual sphere and then a universalist nation-state in the material sphere, the author finds that the search for a postcolonial modernity is necessarily linked with past struggles against modernity.
296 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1993
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897 people want to read
About the author
Partha Chatterjee
75 books98 followersPartha Chatterjee is a political theorist and historian. He studied at Presidency College in Calcutta, and received his Ph.D. from the University of Rochester. He divides his time between Columbia University and the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, where he was the Director from 1997 to 2007. He is the author of more than twenty books, monographs and edited volumes and is a founding member of the Subaltern Studies Collective. He as awarded the Fukuoka Asian Culture Prize for 2009 for outstanding achievements in the field of Asian studies. He is also a poet, playwright, and actor. In the Mira Nair film The Namesake (2007), he played the role of “A Reformed Hindoo.”
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November 6, 2013Much of the evidence Chatterjee provides refers to the specifics of Hindu philosophy and 19th Century Indian history. Being largely unfamiliar, I can't comment on these.
What I can comment on is Chatterjee's use of the concept of an "organic" nationalism that can act as a resistant to global capital. While I certainly sympathize with Chatterjee's critique of capitalism and his attack on orientalist programs (viz. basing all narratives of third-world experience on Western European models), his critique ultimately falls short. Through his method of problematizing "universalist" models, he sets up his own rigid distinction between "India" and "the West." And by claiming that postcolonial nationalism is predicated on difference rather than identity-- an argument that has some merits, although I'm not entirely on board with it-- and is also more inherently just as a counterbalance to capital, he sets a pretext for some of the vilest forms of right-wing Hindu politics of the sort that he claims to oppose. While I would love to see a platform for the liberation of subaltern peoples from Empire, this ain't it.
What I can comment on is Chatterjee's use of the concept of an "organic" nationalism that can act as a resistant to global capital. While I certainly sympathize with Chatterjee's critique of capitalism and his attack on orientalist programs (viz. basing all narratives of third-world experience on Western European models), his critique ultimately falls short. Through his method of problematizing "universalist" models, he sets up his own rigid distinction between "India" and "the West." And by claiming that postcolonial nationalism is predicated on difference rather than identity-- an argument that has some merits, although I'm not entirely on board with it-- and is also more inherently just as a counterbalance to capital, he sets a pretext for some of the vilest forms of right-wing Hindu politics of the sort that he claims to oppose. While I would love to see a platform for the liberation of subaltern peoples from Empire, this ain't it.
February 24, 2013
The epitome of all that is wrong with academia today. Abstruse, difficult, and so jargon-laden and expressionistic as to evoke gastrointestinal vulcanism. I'm no dummy, but I have no idea what this book is about. It seems to be a reading of Indian history and community-based nationalism though, as the back-cover blurb ejaculates the book "challenge[s] the Eurocentricity of...the nation-state, modernity, and indeed history itself". Uh-huh. Some choice gems:
"It is this objection that becomes the basis for the identification in European sociological theory...of all precapitalist gemeinschaften as the domain of ascription, and hence unfreedom, and of modern associations as the field where freedom and choice can blossom."
Well, I'm just gonna disassociate my simplistic arse away from this mess.
"It is this objection that becomes the basis for the identification in European sociological theory...of all precapitalist gemeinschaften as the domain of ascription, and hence unfreedom, and of modern associations as the field where freedom and choice can blossom."
Well, I'm just gonna disassociate my simplistic arse away from this mess.
June 6, 2021
A fantastic first-principles introduction to a critique of anticolonial nationalism. The "big 3" of the social sciences - Marx, Gramsci, Foucault - were probably required reading for this, but I don't think I lost out on a lot and understood his main theses for every chapter anyway. Provides a great frame to view postcolonial history and contemporary Indian politics.
May 21, 2022
This book has many delectable details about the cultural politics of 19th Century Bengal and a few hard bits of theorizing that you may have to chew upon at length. It argues that nationalist resistance to colonialism started showing up in cultural projects much before a political movement could be launched. These took the shape of reimagining Hinduism, India's history, the life of women, relationships between castes, and a new approach to literature and art in Bengal. Each of these categories is explained with wonderfully recounted examples. A few that stand out are the analysis of Ramakrishana Paramahamsa, the history book of Tarinicharan Chattopadhyay, and the chapters on what women were expected to do and how they didn't quite agree.
It was not just women, but even different caste groups and communities wouldn't submit completely to a kind of "homogenizing" project launched by Bengali intellectuals of the time. The book traces these resistances as well, and notes that these contests went unresolved as the nationalist project was only interested in them instrumentally. Historical theorizing is interspersed throughout the book, but the really large chunk is saved for the end (more on that later).
By the second half of the 19th Century, the contradictions of British colonialism were becoming obvious to people in Bengal. While its rhetoric was of spreading Enlightenment values, its economic interests wouldn't allow it in practice. Therefore racial superiority was subtly invoked and discrimination became institutionalized in government machinery. The Bengali middle class realized their position of subjugation. Their association with British government and culture were no longer objects of pride but of self-pity and ridicule. The book gives many examples of this attitude as shown in popular Bengali plays of the time. The author is himself a poet and playwright apart from being a top class historian, so these sections make for great reading. Even history books quickly traversed the long arc of being disinterested accounts of kingly activities, to lamenting the current state of "Bharat" as a big fall from past glory!
Since a head-on confrontation with the state’s apparatus was out of question given the one-sided status quo and memories of the horrific reprisals after the revolt of 1857, the cultural domain was where "resistance" began. The British were no longer welcome to reform Indian society (a position they too were happy to take after 1857). It was "resistance" in the sense that the intellectuals and middle class were out to prove that their cultural domains can be as "modern" - using whatever fanciful notions of equivalence - as the British state institutions were undeniably "modern". Hence arose a major push for all forms of Indian cultural production that would appeal to the sensibilities of the anglicized middle class but couldn’t be blind copies of forms of British culture. Even an anachronistic turn to the occult/mystic along the lines of Ramakrishna Paramahamsa was excused, as long as the import of his teachings could be shown to align with Christian missionary teachings or the nationalist project. The author’s exegesis of a book of Ramakrishna’s teachings is remarkable!
The two sensitive chapters about women also deserve special mention. One is about how they were expected to behave: get an education in one of the newly established nationalist schools that taught mostly in Bengali, and even work, but still not ape the British "memsahib" in cultural aspects. New attire was devised for them, books and magazines in Bengali catered to them. On the whole, their cultural life was to have an imprint that could be projected as the anti-thesis of the racially subjugated political and economic status of the male elite. The other chapter is how the women themselves responded to this new instrumentality for their life. This doesn't find much voice in public life, but the author unearths and carefully analyzes some female memoirs of the time. To quote just one example: the memoir of Saradasundari where she writes of her love of pilgrimages and tolerance of idol worship. In fact her son Keshab Chandra leads a major faction of the Brahmo Samaj and is opposed to both! Also relevant is that Keshab Chandra was the biggest evangelist of Ramakrishna among the Bengali middle class.
Similar stories of attempted co-option of lower castes, peasants are presented in the book, as also their resistances. As the nationalist project gained in political strength, the cultural projects took a backseat until Independence, or were left unresolved. Except for one: the writing of a nationalist history, which would go on to add fuel to the fire of communal politics in the 20th Century. In the early years of the Bengal cultural project it had proved convenient to characterize medieval India under Islamic rule as a time of decay. But that had sowed the seeds of Muslim resentment, and later allowed all kinds of parochial historians to ride this misbegotten horse long after its legitimacy was debunked.
To return to the historical theorizing that I’d mentioned up top. In general the reading gets hard whenever this book theorizes, as opposed to being beautifully fluid when it’s just recounting. And the same applies to an overarching theory that it propounds. The author argues that political philosophers have missed the deep impact that capitalism has had on destroying communitarian belonging. After examining four such figures (John Locke, Montesquieu, Hegel and Karl Marx), the author notes that none of them assign sufficient importance to different communities that humans feel substantively attached to - like caste, religion, region, language and so on. Marxism asserts that capitalism takes off at any place only after a sufficient mass of people are (forcibly?) separated from their means of production and turned into “labour”. The author boldly renames this well-known process of “primitive accumulation” as nothing but the destruction of the dominant forms of (pre-capitalist) community in that place. The reason this perspective gets missed is because for one, the political world today and its historical trajectory are impossible to delink from the outward expansion of European colonialism, and for another, capitalism rides atop the two ideologies of liberalism and the nation-state. The former proclaims emancipation at an individual level, and the latter tries to subsume all of one’s communitarian feelings. Locke, Montesquieu and Hegel - embedded as they are in capitalist societies - fail to see all societies for the “melange of communities” that they originally start out as.
That epithet instead gets applied only to societies like India when colonialism or imperialism meets them - driven by the expansionary nature of capital as it so happens. These societies fail to match the simpler spectrum of family-civil society-nation that capitalist societies have by now settled into. Thus the tendency is strong among colonists to enumerate and classify this bewildering melange and in turn racialize these societies as somehow backward. At the same time, an overwhelming number of these populations too see themselves as bearing the narratives of different communities they’re part of - intersecting or concentric - and by no means as a nation! Therefore what all this theorizing (if you agree with it!) will let you conclude is that when the twain met, both the community-based cultural resistance and the racial profiling of the kind seen in 19th Century Bengal were more or less inevitable, in hindsight.
It was not just women, but even different caste groups and communities wouldn't submit completely to a kind of "homogenizing" project launched by Bengali intellectuals of the time. The book traces these resistances as well, and notes that these contests went unresolved as the nationalist project was only interested in them instrumentally. Historical theorizing is interspersed throughout the book, but the really large chunk is saved for the end (more on that later).
By the second half of the 19th Century, the contradictions of British colonialism were becoming obvious to people in Bengal. While its rhetoric was of spreading Enlightenment values, its economic interests wouldn't allow it in practice. Therefore racial superiority was subtly invoked and discrimination became institutionalized in government machinery. The Bengali middle class realized their position of subjugation. Their association with British government and culture were no longer objects of pride but of self-pity and ridicule. The book gives many examples of this attitude as shown in popular Bengali plays of the time. The author is himself a poet and playwright apart from being a top class historian, so these sections make for great reading. Even history books quickly traversed the long arc of being disinterested accounts of kingly activities, to lamenting the current state of "Bharat" as a big fall from past glory!
Since a head-on confrontation with the state’s apparatus was out of question given the one-sided status quo and memories of the horrific reprisals after the revolt of 1857, the cultural domain was where "resistance" began. The British were no longer welcome to reform Indian society (a position they too were happy to take after 1857). It was "resistance" in the sense that the intellectuals and middle class were out to prove that their cultural domains can be as "modern" - using whatever fanciful notions of equivalence - as the British state institutions were undeniably "modern". Hence arose a major push for all forms of Indian cultural production that would appeal to the sensibilities of the anglicized middle class but couldn’t be blind copies of forms of British culture. Even an anachronistic turn to the occult/mystic along the lines of Ramakrishna Paramahamsa was excused, as long as the import of his teachings could be shown to align with Christian missionary teachings or the nationalist project. The author’s exegesis of a book of Ramakrishna’s teachings is remarkable!
The two sensitive chapters about women also deserve special mention. One is about how they were expected to behave: get an education in one of the newly established nationalist schools that taught mostly in Bengali, and even work, but still not ape the British "memsahib" in cultural aspects. New attire was devised for them, books and magazines in Bengali catered to them. On the whole, their cultural life was to have an imprint that could be projected as the anti-thesis of the racially subjugated political and economic status of the male elite. The other chapter is how the women themselves responded to this new instrumentality for their life. This doesn't find much voice in public life, but the author unearths and carefully analyzes some female memoirs of the time. To quote just one example: the memoir of Saradasundari where she writes of her love of pilgrimages and tolerance of idol worship. In fact her son Keshab Chandra leads a major faction of the Brahmo Samaj and is opposed to both! Also relevant is that Keshab Chandra was the biggest evangelist of Ramakrishna among the Bengali middle class.
Similar stories of attempted co-option of lower castes, peasants are presented in the book, as also their resistances. As the nationalist project gained in political strength, the cultural projects took a backseat until Independence, or were left unresolved. Except for one: the writing of a nationalist history, which would go on to add fuel to the fire of communal politics in the 20th Century. In the early years of the Bengal cultural project it had proved convenient to characterize medieval India under Islamic rule as a time of decay. But that had sowed the seeds of Muslim resentment, and later allowed all kinds of parochial historians to ride this misbegotten horse long after its legitimacy was debunked.
To return to the historical theorizing that I’d mentioned up top. In general the reading gets hard whenever this book theorizes, as opposed to being beautifully fluid when it’s just recounting. And the same applies to an overarching theory that it propounds. The author argues that political philosophers have missed the deep impact that capitalism has had on destroying communitarian belonging. After examining four such figures (John Locke, Montesquieu, Hegel and Karl Marx), the author notes that none of them assign sufficient importance to different communities that humans feel substantively attached to - like caste, religion, region, language and so on. Marxism asserts that capitalism takes off at any place only after a sufficient mass of people are (forcibly?) separated from their means of production and turned into “labour”. The author boldly renames this well-known process of “primitive accumulation” as nothing but the destruction of the dominant forms of (pre-capitalist) community in that place. The reason this perspective gets missed is because for one, the political world today and its historical trajectory are impossible to delink from the outward expansion of European colonialism, and for another, capitalism rides atop the two ideologies of liberalism and the nation-state. The former proclaims emancipation at an individual level, and the latter tries to subsume all of one’s communitarian feelings. Locke, Montesquieu and Hegel - embedded as they are in capitalist societies - fail to see all societies for the “melange of communities” that they originally start out as.
That epithet instead gets applied only to societies like India when colonialism or imperialism meets them - driven by the expansionary nature of capital as it so happens. These societies fail to match the simpler spectrum of family-civil society-nation that capitalist societies have by now settled into. Thus the tendency is strong among colonists to enumerate and classify this bewildering melange and in turn racialize these societies as somehow backward. At the same time, an overwhelming number of these populations too see themselves as bearing the narratives of different communities they’re part of - intersecting or concentric - and by no means as a nation! Therefore what all this theorizing (if you agree with it!) will let you conclude is that when the twain met, both the community-based cultural resistance and the racial profiling of the kind seen in 19th Century Bengal were more or less inevitable, in hindsight.
December 5, 2009
A great combination of theoretical reflection and narrative history. I don't know how he does that. It's amazing how easy the reading of this book is! Coming from the Korean historiography, I knew there were a lot of similarities (and the Korean imitation of subaltern studies) in colonial history writing, but it was much more significantly so than I expected.
I am super excited about his argument that colonialism is the heart of the modern state project. But I am left with the question of, so then can we abandon the whole idea of coloniality? (which I cannot really discuss because of my positionality.) I was not convinced by his treatment of the European experience where nationalism was not as fragmented; the spiritual + material were not divided (did I misread it?). Although he regards the "module" of nationalism as limited to the political domain, and counterpoises his point that nationalism was already developing in the spiritual domain, it seems to me that such cultural consciousness is part of the European model, too. After all, aren't natinalisms quite similar both spiritually and materially?
I am super excited about his argument that colonialism is the heart of the modern state project. But I am left with the question of, so then can we abandon the whole idea of coloniality? (which I cannot really discuss because of my positionality.) I was not convinced by his treatment of the European experience where nationalism was not as fragmented; the spiritual + material were not divided (did I misread it?). Although he regards the "module" of nationalism as limited to the political domain, and counterpoises his point that nationalism was already developing in the spiritual domain, it seems to me that such cultural consciousness is part of the European model, too. After all, aren't natinalisms quite similar both spiritually and materially?
April 24, 2011
Didn't like this as much as others I've read. The scholarship is very impressive but it was a chore to read through (even though i skimmed much of it) and not very approachable. But if someone was doing a specific bit of research on Indian nationalism or something this would be handy. Just not for me.
September 28, 2025
Chatterjee argues that anticolonial nationalism must be explained outside of typical European models for the nation-state, as the framework for the colonial state is fundamentally different in nature.
In historiography, it was assumed that Europe had modeled nationalism and the nation-state across the world. Post-colonial states necessarily modeled their national identity upon Europe. Chatterjee, in response to Anderson's work, argues that this model assumes that other nations cannot imagine their own models and considers this irreconcilable with anticolonial nationalism.
Chatterjee considers the modern nation-state and the colonial state to be fundamentally different. Using India and Bangladesh as test cases, Chatterjee demonstrates that certain ideals of government could not easily be imposed, as the population had a cultural desire to behave in certain ways. Indians, for instance, modeled the caste system and saw fit to recognize a sovereign independent of British governance.
Chatterjee shows how religion, language, and family structure model the inner domain of culture. They are presumed to be different from the colonizer framework, thus creating a hybrid system of culture and governance that made colonial states uniquely able to form an identity in opposition.
In historiography, it was assumed that Europe had modeled nationalism and the nation-state across the world. Post-colonial states necessarily modeled their national identity upon Europe. Chatterjee, in response to Anderson's work, argues that this model assumes that other nations cannot imagine their own models and considers this irreconcilable with anticolonial nationalism.
Chatterjee considers the modern nation-state and the colonial state to be fundamentally different. Using India and Bangladesh as test cases, Chatterjee demonstrates that certain ideals of government could not easily be imposed, as the population had a cultural desire to behave in certain ways. Indians, for instance, modeled the caste system and saw fit to recognize a sovereign independent of British governance.
Chatterjee shows how religion, language, and family structure model the inner domain of culture. They are presumed to be different from the colonizer framework, thus creating a hybrid system of culture and governance that made colonial states uniquely able to form an identity in opposition.
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June 23, 2019Chatterjee's main argument revolves around the difference that is brought to bear in the anti-colonial nationalist imagination - a difference folded away from the external "political" realm into an inner "spiritual" or "cultural" realm. Through such an imagination, anti-colonial nationalism (in this specific case, that Bengali nationalism) projects the colonial regime as an alien outside force with no claim to the nation's sovereignty over its inner spiritual domain. Chatterjee locates this domain within several positions: the appropriated "popular" realm of culture; the "classicized" historical tradition; the private sphere; women; and the idea of community outside the state-capital relation. The postcolonial state, he argues, mobilizes the "nation" to produce consent for a rational state-led developmentalism along the lines of industrial capital and modern representational political mediations - what he terms "the passive revolution of capital."
July 11, 2018
Ne diyebilirim ki... Kolonyal ortamda gelişen milliyetçilik kuramı okuyalım dedik ne bulduk. Tamam kardeşim Hindistan tarihinden argümanlar koyabilirsin eyvallah ama sen kuram muram anlatmıyorsun paşam. Bengal edebiyat tarihçisi olmayacak kimse okumasın. İlk bölüm biraz beklentilerime cevap verebildi iki yıldız oradan. Ayrıca iletişim yayınları. Kadeçim... Ulus ve Parçaları diye başlık atarak ve kitap açıklamasını süsleyerek iyi read bait atmışsınız helaaaal...
January 28, 2018
Hard to imagine a comprehensive understanding of post-colonial nationalism without the seminal contribution of Partha Chatterjee.
October 18, 2023
Read this whole thing today. It is ranging.
Read for MMUF Independent Study.
Read for MMUF Independent Study.
December 2, 2024
didn't agree with much that chatterjee said beyond the trivial stuff.
July 12, 2025
read for class. book was aight. the class fucking sucked
November 4, 2025
This is one of the best reads of my year
December 20, 2016
Chatterjee! :) :) :) Hells yes.
November 26, 2008
Seminal, to say the least. Really good for the history of anticolonial efforts in India for the century leading up to independence. I wish that his chapters on the role of women in the anti-colonial imagination were better.
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February 24, 2013FALSE
March 25, 2012
it's okay but i'm not sure they 'get' the rest of the nationalism literature
Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews