Imagining a Nation into Being

Sailen Routray

The essays of Sudipta Kaviraj have had a sustained and sometimes invisible impact on the narratives surrounding society, politics and the state in India. Each one of his interventions has gone on to structure the academic, and sometimes even popular, commonsense regarding Indian social formations. The volume under review, The Imaginary Institution of India: Politics and Ideas, is the first of a three volume collection that tries to collate a large body of influential work by him, and takes Indian nationalism and the discourses engendered by it for its analytical object. It is part of a larger project of tracing the genealogy of the modern state in India.

Eight essays written over a span of two decades are collected in this volume. The base argument that girds these essays can be summarised in the following propositions – a) the modern, postcolonial state in India is, in many ways, a successor of the colonial state, and to understand processes of its formation we need to have sophisticated accounts of changes produced by colonial intervention; b) to be able to do this, we need to provide two parallel accounts – the first account is that of the governing principles structuring Indian sociality before and during the colonial experience, and the second account is that of the responses to colonial interventions such as those of anti-colonialism and nationalism, and the narrative structures enmeshed in these discourses.

These essays further argue that we can understand precolonial and colonial Indian sociality as being structured through the principles of asymmetrical hierarchy (where aspects of social power are dispersed across social groups unevenly) and that of a peculiarly segmented society where the state was marginal with important executive powers but limited judicial and legislative powers. 

Kaviraj then goes on to provide a powerful story of how the earlier social formation based on the existence of ‘fuzzy’ communities changed substantially through the imperatives of the colonial state such as census and surveys. Through these processes governed by a philosophy of utilitarianism, the colonial state started occupying a place central to the social formation and the very nature of the state in India changed.

According to Kaviraj, when ‘Indians’ started interrogating colonial subjection and moved from a position of anticolonialism to that of nationalism – from asking questions surrounding reasons for India’s civilisational defeat to the possibilities of freedom from colonial rule - certain  key processes got initiated. This involved the production of ‘the nation’, the production of language-based linguistic identities/regions, and the birth and growth of politics as a domain of sociality.

Indian nationalism grew up as essentially diaglossic. Since European forms of social organisation such as the state were seen as key to the success of the colonial enterprise, the nationalist movement (despite contrarian noises by some key players such as Gandhi and Tagore) took as its objective the removal of foreign control over the state rather than a radical restructuring of state-society relations and politics per se. 

Therefore, the adoption of adult-suffrage and parliamentary democracy after independence produced an inevitable clash between democracy and bureaucracy, with development as a discourse playing a role comparable to the one played by utilitarianism during colonialism.

A minor quibble might be stated here. As these essays have been published elsewhere earlier and have similar theoretical predilections, there is a large amount of repetition across the essays. A careful process of editing could have eliminated these, and made the text more reader friendly. That said, Kaviraj’s narrative about the state in India is an important one, and it is high time these influential papers were collected in one volume. 

Details About the Book: Sudipta Kaviraj. 2010. The Imaginary Institution of India: Politics and Ideas. New York: Columbia University Press. 299 pp., ISBN 9-780231-152235

Note: This review was first published in the year 2011 in the the journal Contemporary South Asia 19(3).