Pranab Bardhan interviews Partha Chatterjee over at his substack:
Pranab Bardhan (PB): 1. In your book you make an important and unconventional distinction between the nation-state and the people-nation. For readers unfamiliar with this, can you elaborate a bit on this with examples? In my substack post of June 18, 2025 I made a distinction between state-centric nationalism in India (as, for example, that usually associated with Nehru, Patel and Ambedkar, and I suppose also Savarkar) and society- or community-centric nationalism (often associated with Tagore and Gandhi). I think you emphasize the regionally diverse imaginings of the nation expressed in varieties of local print languages (I presume this is in the broad analytical framework of Benedict Anderson’s classic work on nationalism, Imagined Communities). But you seem to find the Tagore-Nehru-Gandhi pluralist (’unity in diversity’) idea of India almost as limited as the more malign Hindu-nationalist idea. Are you suggesting that both are based on a possibly shallow or blinkered understanding of Indian history?
Partha Chatterjee (PC): The two views are not shallow, but both may be said to be blinkered. The state-centric as well as the community-centric view takes the present-day entity called India as a singular object endowed with a long civilizational history going back to the distant past. The difference between the two is that the first view traces that civilizational history through the succession of imperial state formations from the Maurya to the Mughal, the Maratha and the British, while the second prefers to locate it in the cumulative but stable arrangement of social relations within rural communities. Both views depend heavily on the historical scholarship in the English language of European, and later Indian, writers in the 19th and 20th centuries.
What both views ignore is that the consciousness of being a nation spread only in the early 20th century from a bilingual middle-class literati to wider sections of the people through speeches, histories, songs, poetry, fiction and performance in the regional languages. The resultant image of the Indian nation varied considerably from one regional cultural formation to another. This is what I call the history of the people-nation.
More here.
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