The Forging of Nationhood
By- Gyanendra Pandey and Peter Geschiere (eds.)
Unlike most writings on nationalism, and the related
concepts of development and modernity, this book is the product of a
conversation begun among historians of the South—or what used to be known as
the ‘Third World’. It shows how much there is to learn about these facets of
the modern world from closer attention to the experience of the directly or
indirectly colonized parts of Asia, Africa, the Caribbean and Latin America
and, no less importantly, from direct interaction between scholars from these
regions.
The notions of nationhood and liberal development
have been disseminated so successfully in recent times that they have come to
be viewed almost as ‘natural’. It is easy to forget how long and difficult the
struggle has been to establish ideas of popular sovereignty and individual
equality as universally applicable rights. For, as this book demonstrates, the
rhetoric of the inclusive claims of liberty and equality that nationalism and
other related movements promote is accompanied by the practice of exluding
numerous classes, communities and individuals from precisely these claims. This
happens to be the case both within, and across, nations. Indeed, the story of
nationalism and of modern ‘civilization’ could scarcely have been written
without such exclusions.
Several papers in this volume show how members of
excluded groups can suffer from nationalism’s impatience with difference, and
conclude with the hope of reforming the nation state. Yet their collective
contributions also suggest that the concept of the essential, cultural
nation—and perhaps therefore the idea of the nation itself, as it has been
handed down to us—needs serious questioning; and with that of course the existing
forms of the modern state.
Gyanendra
Pandey was Professor of History at the University of Delhi from 1986 to
1998, before moving to his present position as Professor of History and
Anthropology at the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, USA.
Peter
Geschiere taught History and Anthropology at the Free University
(Amsterdam), the Erasmus University (Rotterdam) and the EHESS
(Paris/Marseille). At present he is Professor of African Anthropology at Leiden
University and the University of Amsterdam.
ISBN
81-7304-425-2 2003 304p.
Rs.500/Pounds 50
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