ABSTRACT
At the time that Ramananda Chatterjee was formulating the concept of the nation in India, few scholars in the West had taken an objective look at it. It was not until 1960 that scholars began to take a serious look at the idea and carried it beyond polemics. This chapter takes a look at the various theories of nations and nationalism, including prominent Western scholars, such as Ernest Gellner, Benedict Anderson and many others right up to the twenty-first century. In addition to Western ideas, Indian ideas on this subject are explored too, prominently the work of Rabindranath Tagore, who wrote a treatise on it. Though Ramananda Chatterjee had been the president of the Hindu Mahasabha, he strongly disagreed with the ideas of the nation as postulated by his contemporary and Hindutva ideologue Vinayak Damodar Savarkar.
