Nationalism: A Split Phenomenon?
Partha Pratim Shil
DEPENDENCE AND DISILLUSIONMENT: EMERGENCE OF NATIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS IN LATER NINETEENTH CENTURY INDIA by Sudhir Chandra Oxford University Press, 2012, 195 pp., 695
June 2012, volume 36, No 6

The text under review is a re-publication of a monograph that initially appeared in 1975. It looked at the emergence of, what the author calls, a ‘national consciousness’, in late nineteenth century colonial India. Though it has a new introduction, the main body of the text is not a revision of the earlier edition. Therefore, as a reviewer, one is inhibited in making it stand the scrutiny of subsequent conceptual developments with which the phenomenon of nationalism is now studied. Since one cannot ever bracket out the awareness of these later developments, this review is a set of responses that only seeks to assess whether the book actually accomplishes what it sets out to do.

In the dramatic debates of the late 1960s between nationalist Marxist and revisionist historians that today constitute the initial historiography of nationalist movements in India, Chandra alleged a ‘Manichean insistence on seeing things in either or terms’ (p. xxiii). They either unveil the material interests that constituted the reality of nationalist ideology or posit nationalist ideology as having transcended the social location of its leaders.

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