ABSTRACT
If one agrees that popular imagination plays an important role in the enterprise of nation-building, and then the importance of mass media in it has to be recognized. This chapter focuses on the role of the media in the creation of national imagination through the example of Ramananda Chatterjee, who published several journals in three languages - Bengali, English and Hindi - to reach different but overlapping publics. It attempts to show that the several journals are representative of the Indian media of the first half of the 20th century that created a public sphere in which an Indian national consciousness - social, political, cultural, and historical - was sought to be built. This in turn is pitted against the consciousness of the empire builders of Britain, who justified the British presence in Asia, Africa and other parts of the world as a civilising mission.
