Critiques of Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities

                                                                                                       - Sathya Nath, Sohini Dutta.

(This article was written as a classroom assignment under the guidance of  Dr. C. Vipin Kumar for the course "A Beginner's Guide to Cultural Studies" at The English and Foreign Languages University, Lucknow Campus) 

Introduction

Benedict Anderson is a historian who is noted for his radical writings on nationalism. Using a historical materialist approach, he describes the major factors contributing to the emergence of nationalism in the world during the past three centuries in his seminal work Imagined Communities (1983). Not only has this work been sold more than a quarter of a million copies since its first publication, it has also been translated into dozens of languages. It has contributed to a new field of study and has been highly influential in many interdisciplinary studies. For students of English literature, when it comes to addressing questions regarding print capitalism, novel and new literary forms, definitions of literature as nationalist literature etc, this work is unavoidable.

In this paper we will summarize Anderson’s ideas regarding the conceptualization of the nation as an ‘imagined community’, of ‘homogenous, empty time’ and print-capitalism. Anderson viewed the Western ‘modular’ form of the nationalism as being universal which is a problem in his conception. It would seem that a country like India is only a perpetual consumer of Western modernity which is conflicting with the reality. Therefore, we will also trace some of the problems of his theory by a reading of Partha Chatterjee, Eric J. Hobsbawm and John Breuilly. Chatterjee is one of the leading members of the well-known subaltern studies collective of scholars whereas a representation of the traditional Marxist school of thought is made by Hobsbawm. Breuilly was a Marxist historian who worked extensively on areas such as nationalism and ethnicity, urban cultural history in 19^th century Europe and modern liberalism.

An Outline of Imagined Communities

In his book Anderson defines the nation as a politically imagined community, which is imagined as both limited and sovereign. Anderson proposes that nationalism is a cultural artefact which acquires concrete shape through the institution of print capitalism in the structural forms of the novel and the newspaper. It is “modular, capable of being transplanted with varying degrees of self consciousness, to a great variety of social terrains, to be merged and be merged with a correspondingly wide variety of political and ideological constellations.” (2006:4). The modular influences of modern European languages and literatures were considered as standards by which different territories define themselves as nation. This form, which is a product of post-Enlightenment thought, was the most universalist resource that the West had.

He then takes up three cultural conceptions - namely the idea of sacred language, a society ruled by monarchs and the messianic time. Transition in these to vernaculars, sovereign states and homogenous, empty time, respectively, “made it possible to ‘think’ nation”. In messianic time, community was imagined regardless of language as vernacular. A nation, that corresponds with a particular vernacular language became imagined only when this notion of time gave way to a homogenous, empty time which is the ‘new’ concept of simultaneity. So, the germinal of nation as an idea is very new and modern. This is opposed to what was originally believed of a nation.

Print capitalism produces the new form of simultaneity. In the case of newspaper there is a simultaneous consumption of it by people who are unaware of one another’s identity. In novel the author fills the empty time with characters and events. The events are performed at a specific clocked, calendrical time by actors who do not know each other. Both the forms, hence, create an imagined world in the reader’s mind. Also, Anderson viewed that print capitalism laid the basis for national consciousness by creating a unified field of communication, languages-of-power and fixity of language.

Critiquing Anderson: Some alternative ideas on nationalism

Partha Chatterjee, attempts a critique of Imagined Communities in the first chapter of his book The Nation and Its Fragments (1993) which he titles as ‘Whose Imagined Community?’. Here he challenges the idea of nation as being imagined from certain modular forms. He argues that nationalism is not rooted “on an identity but rather on a difference of the modular forms of the nationalist society propagated by the modern west.” (1993:5). There was the creation of another form which is indigenous and ‘original’ to every nation. This ‘original’ form is what Chatterjee terms as a sovereign nation in the post-colonial world. Therefore, the meaning of the term ‘imagined community’ is not a universal one. If at all a nation is imagined, it is imagined differently by different nations.

An explanation of this is given by stating the existence of two sovereign domains-the material domain (the State and formal elements) which is an imitation of the West and the spiritual domain (consisting of the ‘national culture’), the sovereign territory from which the colonial society emerged well before the beginning of its political battle with the coloniser. It is in this sovereign spiritual domain that nationalism is said to have begun.  The spiritual domain consists of the national language created by the native elites who tried to make the native language fit into the ‘modern’ culture keeping the State out of its periphery. Similarly, the cultural forms of drama and novel were also ‘modernized’. Instead of aping the West, they constructed their own modernized artistic space. Other institutions like the secondary schools were also created. A space was provided for the new elites to generalize and normalize a new language and literature outside the domain of the State. In the domain of the family, the nationalists asserted the right to the reformation of the tradition where the intervention of the colonialists was not allowed. Therefore, one can see that in this spiritual domain the nationalist elite did not allow either the European missionaries or the colonial State to mould  it as an identical form of the ‘modular’ and instead made a clear distinction from it.  

In another book The Politics of the Governed (2004), Chatterjee critiques Anderson’s concept of ‘empty, homogenous time’ and politics of universalism. Anderson elaborates on the conception of politics of universalism as something belonging to the new concept of temporality (in The Spectre of Comparisons). In this, the world is viewed as one i.e. politics as an occurrence is uniform everywhere. Politics, in this sense, inhabits the empty homogenous time space of modernity. Chatterjee discards the idea of ‘empty, homogenous time’ by stating it to be the ‘utopian time of Capital’.  It is something not related in real space which he says consists of heterotopia. He asserts the idea that time is ‘heterogenous, unevenly dense.’ Since it is heterogeneous, the politics is also not the same for all the people, thereby discarding the idea of universality. This shows the short-circuit in thought which Anderson represents.

Unlike Chatterjee’s critique, the differences that Eric J. Hobsbawm holds from Anderson are not directly stated. A symptomatic reading of the two can help one construct a critique of Anderson. In Nations and Nationalisms Since 1780 (1990) Hobsbawm traces the various phases and forms of nationalism since the Enlightenment. Endorsing Anderson, he too argues that nation is not natural or inherent but rather of a historically recent origin. However, when distinguishing between nation and nationalism he says that ‘nationalism comes before nations. Nations do not make states and nationalisms but the other way round.’ (1990:10). Hobsbawm is also of the view that “nation” cannot be considered as something outlined and disseminated by newspaper columns and editorials. So, unlike Anderson, he says that we must look at “the sub-literary” level in order to know the concept of nation. And, in that sense, print capitalism alone will not be enough.

Anderson’s theory that a national identification directly comes into existence by means of the time of capital is held inadequate by Hobsbawm who argues that for the ordinary people, “nation” is not a singular kind of identification solely made by capital/time. It is “combined with identifications of another kind”. For example: for many people, India as a standard also means being Hindu, or partly a Bengali, a Hindi speaker. For many people being Hindu is a super condition to have the national identification of being Indian, over and above the national/state condition. Hobsbawm also believes that nationalist movements make use of pre-existing cultures. He then says that one cannot distinguish “nation” from previous societies unlike Anderson who had distinguished them from the modern nation.

Anderson thought that nation emerged out of a need for some inevitable localization or imagination of some group as a local one that differentiates itself from other nations/societies. The modern nation then should have first originated as a result of a tension somewhere in a colonized place, but not certainly in Europe, where print capitalism originated. Here Hobsbawm demonstrates that nation is not simply a result of a need to imagine oneself as a new kind of society in the modern times in this way. Anderson also believes that national imagination grows evenly through novel and newspaper, across all regions, or that at least it would be universal to all regions alike sooner or later. However, Hobsbawm differs by saying that it instead grows unevenly through social groupings or classes at different stages. Ranajit Guha,a subaltern historiographer, noted that in the Indian context  there existed the bourgeois nationalist historiography and the colonialist historiography, both of which were predominantly elite achievements. The subaltern historiography emerged much later. This reflects the unevenness mentioned before.

Another theorist, John Breuilly, in Nationalism and the State (1982), claims that nationalist political consciousness originates from oppositional activity within modern states. Nationalism, he says, is a parasitic movement and an ideology which is shaped by what it opposes. The general condition for the development of anti-colonial nationalism is the existence of a distinct power under foreign control. The very statement echoes Chatterjee’s assumption of the difference between the anti-colonial nationalism from the modular forms of the West. He refers to nationalism as political movements seeking or exercising power and justifying such actions with nationalist arguments.

Conclusion

Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities has provided the impetus for other scholars on nationalism and area specialists to formulate different ideas on nationalism. Although a foundational work, it has been criticized on the levels of the validation of its various concepts. While Anderson’s view of nation is normative and universal, Chatterjee offers a counter-narrative. Hobsbawm registers the problem of print-capitalism and the historical class problematic to the discussion while Breuilly argues the necessity of political sovereignty for nationalism. These criticisms result in enriching our understanding of the concept better. Nationalism as an ‘imagined’ concept is not universal; it is rather something that varies across space and time.

References:

Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London: Verso, 2006.

Anderson, Benedict, The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia and the World, London: Verso, 1998.

Breuilly, John, Nationalism and the State, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1982.

Chatterjee, Partha, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1993.

Chatterjee, Partha, The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World, Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004.

Guha, Ranajit, ‘On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India’ in Ranajit Guha (ed.) Subaltern Studies, Vol. 1. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994. Pp. 1-8.

Hobsbawm, Eric J., Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.