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Nationalism Without a Nation in India, by G. Aloysius. Delhi; New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. 265 pp. $ 13.95 paper. ISBN: 0-19-564653-3.
The study of nationalism in India has been the preserve of historians. In their scholarship and debates, historians have organized themselves around the details of the national movement led by the Indian National Congress. A powerful critique of such elite-centered historiography has recently been provided by members of the Subaltern Studies Collective. But they too, curiously enough, have oriented their study of subaltern struggles to the national movement, if only to deny the participation of subaltern social movements in a single Congress-led freedom movement. Nationalism-as an idea, ideology, identity politics-has become a topic of inquiry in many parts of the world, but, with the notable exception of Partha Chatterjee, there are few philosophical or sociological analyses of Indian nationalisms.
This provocative and hard-hitting study by Aloysius seeks to step into this void and begins with a contemporary problem. He notes that India has become not a nation-state but, in fact, a powerful state-system comprised of multiple warring communities (p. 2). There is, he suggests, no nation. Yet India gained independence from British rule in 1947 as the culmination of a long and successful national...