ABSTRACT
Theorists of nationalism and historians of the colonized world in the past dealt inadequately with the problem of cultural difference. Unable to avoid confronting this vital issue, South Asian historiography had developed some unique analytical conventions. By far the most pervasive of these was the binary opposition between a religiously informed ‘communalism’ and a secular ‘nationalism’. That the dichotomy was partly a product of a dominant historical paradigm evolved in the West was suggested by Partha Chatterjee’s depiction of Indian nationalism as ‘a derivative discourse’ (Chatterjee 1986). Benedict Anderson too in his revised version of Imagined Communities shifted the locus of the formation of nationalist discourse from local dynasties to the colonial state. Yet contrary to Anderson’s claims, strenuous attempts by the votaries of colonial modernity to shape national imaginings through three key institutions of power – the census, map and museum (Anderson 1991: 163-86) – were never wholly successful in shrinking the mental horizons of the colonized peoples of Asia and Africa. It would be a cardinal historiographical error to assume that identities as well as ideas about sovereignty were confined within the territorial framework established by the imperial powers, even if colonial frontiers continue to define the borders of most postcolonial nation-states. To do so is to grant undue importance to what has been called the official nationalism of post-colonial states at the cost of the multiple alternative strands of popular nationalism and communitarianism that may have lost out in the final battle for state power. Anderson’s general theory on the nation as an imagined community also
did not sufficiently problematise the relationship between colonialism and assertions of cultural difference in contexts where there were competing definitions of identity and contesting claims to sovereignty. Nowhere was this more marked than in colonial India. The cultural roots of Indian nationalism, not unlike many European nationalisms, were informed by religious ideals and reinterpreted and reconfigured in an imaginative fashion. Pakistani nationalism too was not without its ‘secular’ strands. Assigning the categories ‘secular’ and religiously ‘communal’ to these two versions of subcontinental nationalisms detracts from understanding the problem of cultural difference in colonial India. What is needed is a powerful intellectual challenge to the
tyranny of a pernicious scheme of hierarchy privileging a particular brand of nationalism over ‘communalism’ that has been one of the more lasting legacies of the colonial sociology of knowledge. The globalization of the nation-state by colonial powers was distinct from
the global imaginings of the colonized. Voices from colonized Asia, articulating universalistic aspirations, contended with the universalistic claims emanating from post-enlightenment Europe. Universalism and anti-colonialism were not necessarily antithetical to each other even if there were reservations among the colonized about the territorial nation-state. In his poem ‘Mazhab’ or ‘Religion’, Muhammad Iqbal, the great poet-philosopher, used the word millat to distinguish it from territorial nationalism, which he saw as a weapon of European imperialism designed to destroy the unity of Islam:
Don’t compare your millat with the nations of the west Distinctive is the qaum of the Prophet of Islam Their solidarity depends on territorial nationality Your solidarity rests on the strength of your religion When faith slips away, where is the solidarity of the community? And when the community is no more, neither is the millat.
