Response

4 Ghazal Asif Professor Iza Hussin

Colony / Empire / Nation: Imagining the Subimperial

If nationalisms in the rest of the world have to choose their imagined community from certain modular form already made available to them by Europe and the Americas, what do they have left to imagine? Europe and the Americas, the only true subjects of history, have thought out on our behalf not only the script of colonial enlightenment and exploitation, but also that of our anticolonial resistance and postcolonial misery, (Chatterjee 1993, 5). In the introduction to his landmark book The Nation and Its Fragments, Partha Chatterjee captures a deep sense of frustration with existing understandings of nationalism and imagination in the study of the rest of the world, as he put it. This paper will look at two books that consider questions of nationalist imagination in the era before the rise of the modern nation-state in the mid-twentieth centuryBenedict Andersons Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, and Thomas R Metcalfs Imperial Connections: India in the Indian Ocean Arena 1860-1920. While seemingly about fairly different subjects, I suggest that the implications of both books for understanding not only questions of the centre/periphery in the modern world, but also nationalism as a consequence of the modern world, are best served by considering both works. As the title of Benedict Andersons seminal work suggests, Imagined Communities recognizes the imagined nature of nationalism. Imagined Communities broke new ground in that he conclusively showed how nationalism came to exist in the manner it does today through various mechanisms, especially through print-capitalism. Anderson examines, in the context of Europe, how this nationalism came to be imagined by those inhabiting a particular space, as well as the means by which forms of an identical nationalist imagination came to be spread to every corner of a particular 1

Response 4 Ghazal Asif Professor Iza Hussin nation and sovereign entity. For Anderson, the nation is a cohesive, imagined, political communityand imagined as both limited and sovereign, (Anderson 2006, 6). With this sentence he points to one of the most enduring critiques of his work, which have been that the sovereignty of the nation as state, and erstwhile national imaginary can be mapped onto each other easily, and that somehow the apparently organic spread of the imagined community happened to coincide exactly with state boundaries as they exist today. For Anderson, it was not particularly fruitful to disentangle nationalism from the various nation-states in the world today, since they were too closely bound up with one another. Thomas Metcalfs study of the Raj shows demonstrates, however, the problematic assumptions made by Anderson herein. Imperial Connections is a history book not explicitly concerned with the rise of the modern nation-states that make up the shores of the Indian Ocean today. As with other historians and anthropologists of the Indian Oceans robust past, the aim of scholarship is to recover a lost world, a world which ended either with the advent of European colonial adventures, or by the end of the First World War (as is the case here). The Indian Ocean was a center of much trade, interaction and activity, he suggests up until 1920 when it all seemed to come to an end. As British imperial control was consolidated from Malaya to East Africa, the Indian Ocean became a British lake, but still very much the site of much cross-pollination of ideas and influences, as well as commercial trade and labour activity in a kind of proto-globalisation. Fundamentally, Imperial Connections is a history that seeks to upset conventional understandings of center/periphery wherein all roads in the Empire led, separately, to London isolated from each other, as a precursor to the nation-states that exist there today. Rather, Metcalf demonstrates, the world of the Raj is better understood as a web, with various

Response 4 Ghazal Asif Professor Iza Hussin nodesIndia, however, occupying a subimperial position on that web (Metcalf 2007, 8). India thus became not only a central reference point with which to govern the (other) colonies, but also actively helped in gaining those colonies, as illustrated in the accounts of the Indian Army and the recruitment of Sikh soldiers. Further, it was through these other coloniesnotably East and South Africawherein the notion of India as place of belonging began to take hold, transcending the many divisions within India itself. The notion of nationalism as inextricably connected to the condition of exile is not only a particularly Saidian notion of belonging,1 but also complicates Andersonian notions of nationalism spreading through the community in an organic form through technologies such as print capitalism. In other ways, however, it also dovetails with the suggestion of top-down nationalism Anderson put forward for the postcolony. Although Metcalf complicates the ruler/subject binary of Cambridge School history, his chapter on Constructing Identities makes it appear as if post/colonial community could not have existed without the interjection of colonialism, going so far as to suggest that nationalism could grow only at the expense of empire, (Metcalf 2007, 210). Partha Chatterjee has discussed nationalism in detail in The Nation and Its Fragments with regard to not only the postcolony, but especially the evidence on anticolonial nationalism, which are not based on the kind of growth of identification that Anderson argues for but on the basis of a difference with the modular forms of the national society propagated by the modern West (Chatterjee 1993, 5). In laying out the aims of his book, Chatterjee has suggested the task is to trace in their mutually conditioned historicities the specific forms that have appearedin the domain defined by the hegemonic project of nationalist modernity, and on the other, in the numerous fragmented resistances to that normalizing project, (Chatterjee 1993, 13). One
1 Edward Saids concept of the intellectual in exile, and his relationship to the place of belonging, are relevant here.

Response 4 Ghazal Asif Professor Iza Hussin imagines that Chatterjee would perhaps object to Metcalfs connections of nationalism through exile and conditioned through the colonial experience. In Chatterjees framework, the importance of the fragment is that it cannot be shaped through the colonial episteme; that it resisted the totalizing nature of the colonial imagination. Metcalfs history, on the other hand, doubly implicates India within the colonial episteme as subimperial, as both coloniser and colonized, and as understanding itself as India through the colonial experience. In two appendices to the revised edition of Imagined Communities, Anderson does address the question of postcolonial nationalism. Rather, than assuming they simply followed the European model, he now adds that the postcolonial states derived the grammar of their official nationalism from the preceding colonial states, which in turn impacted the difference between these national communities and the European models (Anderson 2006, 163). He then goes on to discuss the forms that this official nationalism takes, considering in turn maps, the census, and the museum as repositories of a particular imagination that is derived from the preceding colonial state. Similar trends can be seen in Metcalfs analysis of Malay Muslim as being constructed rather than negotiated, with the colonial regime by way of India. Nationalism, and sense of community, as being produced only in relation to the colonial power, thus come across in both Metcalfs and Andersons accounts of belonging in the colonies, albeit in very different ways. Chatterjees call for a framework of mutually conditioned and mutually complicit history, mentioned above, is thus precisely what Andersons understanding of the history of the nation lacks, and what Metcalfs Imperial Connections brings out so forcefully through the notion of the subimperial.