Nation as ‘modern’ community: Explorations of ‘Maratha Nationalism’

Jayant Lele

Queens University

Kingston, Canada

This paper will begin with an examination of Nairn’s claim that nation is a modern community. His notions of modernity and community, when reinterpreted, enable us to make a more historically sensitive analysis of the various Asian manifestations of nationalism. Analysis of Maratha nationalism in India will be attempted to illustrate this point.

The current conceptions of modernity are deeply enmeshed with the European transition from feudalism to capitalism. We will dissociate the concept from these specific contextual trappings to examine its key element which, it will be argued, is the critical-reflexive competence of a society, any society, which manifests itself under conditions of societal crisis (Habermas, Legitimation Crisis, 1975). This competence - a future-oriented understanding of the present, an understanding that is still deeply embedded in the past - is the moment of modernity and as such it arises in all societies. Adorno’s pregnant comment “One must have tradition in oneself, to hate it properly”, as radically reinterpreted by Lazarus (1999), sums up the dynamic contradictory relation between tradition and modernity. Specific manifestations of nationalism in Asia, as elsewhere, rather than being treated as mere imitations of or reactions to the Western models and practices, can be viewed as a creative response, well anchored in the past, to a societal crisis and oriented towards its future resolution. They are modern in this sense. If national identity is made up of ‘myth and memory’ (Anthony Smith, 1989:18), this is not a matter of ‘modern’ states simply ‘incorporating’ some features of a ‘pre-modern’ ethnic community but a dynamic engagement between a dynamic and still-relevant past and ‘a yet to be attained but already envisioned as possible’ future. Nationalism as a moment of modernity also reflects that tension and remains, as Habermas has it, an unfinished project.

Nationalism is also a community in the sense that its inner tension is a product of the conflict between real inequalities in national communities and the promise of equality that a nation represents. Nation, therefore, is always a ‘project’ of equality. Anderson’s observation that ‘regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail’ a nation is “always conceived as a deep horizontal comradeship” (1991:7) speaks to the discrepancy in all manifestations of nationalism. This tension is what constitutes the basis of transitions that are witnessed in the various manifestations of nationalism.

The paper will examine the four basic dimensions of nation as a community: territory, production relations, language and culture (culture in this case encompasses a sense of belonging that emerges out of the interaction of the first three). The various phases of Maratha nationalism will be discussed as an illustration of these reinterpretations of the concepts of modernity and community. The analysis of Maratha nationalism is important because since its origins in Shivaji’s Swarajya in the 17th century, and through its many forms, it has remained powerful and relevant in Indian politics. The myth of Shivaji as a nation-builder has been important in the shaping and reshaping of Indian nationalism. From the rise of Maratha power in the 17th century to the dramatic reaction to a book on Shivaji, published in 2003, the memory of Shivaji remains a potent reminder of the idea of nation as a modern community and a major source of inspiration for the associated political/cultural imaginings in India. The paper will examine the significance of these and other intervening events.