Notions of Nationhood in Bengal: Perspectives on Samaj, c. 1867-1905

Download or read book Notions of Nationhood in Bengal: Perspectives on Samaj, c. 1867-1905 written by Swarupa Gupta and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2009-06-24 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book reopens the debate on colonial nationalisms, going beyond ‘derivative’, ‘borrowed’, political and modernist paradigms. It introduces the conceptual category of samaj to demonstrate how indigenous socio-cultural origins in Bengal interacted with late-colonial discourses to produce the notion of a nation. Samaj (a historical society and an idea-in-practice) was a site for reconfiguring antecedents and negotiating fragmentation. Drawing on indigenous sources, this study shows how caste, class, ethnicity, region and community were refracted to conceptualise wider unities. The mapping of cultural continuities through change facilitates a more nuanced investigation of the ontology of nationhood, seeing it as related to, but more than political nationalism. It outlines a fresh paradigm for recalibrating postcolonial identities, offering interpretive strategies to mediate fragmentation.