The Partha Chatterjee Omnibus: Comprising Nationalist thought and the Colonial World

This omnibus comprises three of Partha Chatterjee’s finest works and marks a significant phase in the intellectual journey of one of India’s foremost political scientists. The common thread that unities the three books is the principal object of study which is the existing nation-state. The first, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World traces the ‘ideological history’ of the Indian nation-state from its conception to its fruition. The Nation and Its Fragments, through a series of interventions in different disciplinary fields, converged upon the same object–the Indian nation-state as it had developed after four decades of its post-colonial career. The last, A Possible India is a more strategic and contingent, and hence more actively political, engagement with the object of analysis–namely, the present career and crisis of the Indian nation-state. Nationalist thought and the Colonial World, first published in 1986, has attained the status of a classic. In this significant book, the author criticizes western theories of third world nationalism-both liberal and Marxist, demonstrating how western concepts of nationalism have imposed themselves on non-western people. The Nation and Its Fragments, Chatterjee points out that scholars have been mistaken in looking for nationalism only in the political domain of the state. He shows how the nationalists sought to create a new ‘nationalist’ modernity around the institutions of language, religion, literature, art, education and the family. In A Possible India, using a variety of stylistic genres-essays, commentaries, book reviews, journal entries-a panoptic view of long term changes in the overall system as well as close and detailed observations of fifty years of Indian politics since independence is offered. The book’s concern is to develop a perspective on democracy in India, not in the cliche-ridden sense of government of, by and for the people, but as the politics of the governed. Taken together, all three books investigate the relation between rulers and peoples within the imagined-into-reality framework of the Indian nation. Written in an engaging and original style, this collection is invaluable for all those interested in the ideas and politics of colonialism and postcolonialism.