ABSTRACT
Chatterjee beautifully goes on to adumbrate the peculiar contradiction the liberating consciousness is prone to between the ‘metropolitan capital and the people-nation’ for all postcolonial nationalisms, where the passive revolution of the former continues to realise itself through the spurious agency of the state as a substitute for an authentic politics of the latter. An anti-nationalist tract might attribute this charismatic appeal to the ‘mythopoeic imagination of the childlike peasant’ in the symptomatic terms of ‘an unhealthy nervous excitement’. This morbid tendency surfaces in the India’s inevitable transition to the rational modernity ‘such as often passed through the peasant classes of Europe in the Middle Ages’. Gellner’s argument is self-avowedly theoretical: it is true that the conclusion hides the need to provide any empirical evidence about the transition to nationalist modernity from an ‘ agro-literate’ form of the primitive association.
