Sunday, December 2, 2001		Books

Nation as a cultural construct
Review by Surinder S. Jodhka

Culture, Space and the Nation-State: From Sentiment to Structure
by Dipankar Gupta. Sage Publications, New Delhi. Pages 282. Rs 445.

NATIONS are not merely geographical entities having marked boundaries or political entities with sovereign identities. Nations come into existence only when those living in the given geographical and political territory identify with them. Or, in other words, a political territory can be described as a nation only when it has successfully mobilised a nationalist sentiment which is essentially a culture process.

Culture, however, is not a simple category, referring merely to "a way of life". It has been a rather difficult concept even for the professional anthropologists. There are no agreements on a single definition of the concept. Apart from referring to "a way of life", culture, as has been pointed out by many, also involves questions of power. The values and belief systems are not neutral categories. Similarly, culture is not merely about the tradition or what is inherited from the past. It also includes the modern values and new ideas that have become part a parcel of the modern living.

So how does one approach culture? Giving his own solution to the problem, Gupta suggests that much of the difficulty associated with the study of culture could be sorted out if culture is examined on the basis of, what he calls, the root metaphors that govern interactions between people.

What does he mean by root metaphor. For Gupta, it refers to the "symbols that evoke cathectivity, partnership and aesthetic commitment". He elaborates his argument by giving two examples of root metaphors. The first is that of hierarchy of purity and pollution, which can be seen as a root metaphor of the pre-modern and traditional Indian caste system. In contrast, root metaphor of the American culture, according to Gupta, is individualism.

Having defined his notion of culture as subscription to root metaphors, Gupta elaborates on his concept of nation-state. Nations, according to him, are defined by "the popular sacralisation of territory". Membership of a territorial identity becomes a paramount sentiment only in the nation-state when the given territory begins to be treated as something sacred. Though pre-modern empires too had geographical boundaries, their subjects did not identify so closely with the territory and did not see themselves as members of a territorial community. They were simply the subjugated people, not citizens.

A nation-state, on the other hand, is "born out of popular participation, long distance communication, and large-scale supra-local mobilisations along ideologies that transcended parochial boundaries. The ideologies that grouped people from long distances into a community must necessarily have the ability to transcend local mires of root metaphors based on dense face to face interactions." Territory, in the nation-state, begins to signify the culture space within which the community aspires towards common goals.

The community called the nation state, therefore, is a modern phenomenon for it is premised on participation of a kind that is impossible in either feudal or absolutist regimes. It is for this reason that though caste system is a core institution of the Indian society, hierarchy or purity and pollution could not become the root metaphors of the Indian nation-state. Some of the dominant root-metaphors of the Indian nation state, according to Gupta, are those of anti-colonialism, the metaphor of ancient and glorious civilisation, the metaphor of equality and participation, and the metaphor of Pakistan.

The emergence of nation as a supra-local community obviously requires a re-negotiation of identities. Every nation has to come to terms with the given set of communities and cultural differences among the groups of people inhabiting the given geographical boundaries. Such negotiations, according to Gupta, are determined by the manners in which the different nation-states come into being. In the Indian case, for example, the freedom movement against the colonial rule has been the most crucial factors.

The mobilisation of the lower castes and minorities and their participation in the freedom movement determined, to a significant extent, the policy of the independent India towards these groups. The nation-state claims to speak in the name of all!

Thus, for a nation-state to survive in the long run, it not only has to mobilise the sentiment of a supra-local identity but also has to work out strategies and initiate policy measures that would enable everyone to participate. Moving from the discussion of sentiment to that of structures, Gupta argues that in ordser to evolve a new kind of fraternity, it becomes necessary for the nation-state to restructure traditional or medieval hierarchies. This is where the question of citizenship becomes critical. "‘All well-developed contemporary nation-states are concerned about realising substantive citizenship, though the method adopted may be vastly different". Citizenship, thus, works as a form of membership of a modern liberal democratic nation-state.

However, national sentiment does not automatically lead to the formation of liberal democratic institutions. It is here that Gupta introduces the discussion of civil society as an imperative for a liberal democracy. "If the structures set up for enhancing fraternity are done without the condition of civil society being present than those structures are bound to become patronizing, static and sources of vested interest".

Intervening in what could be called as the Indian debate of civil society, Gupta finds many problems with the manner in which the term civil society was commonly understood in the writings of scholars like Rajni Kothari, Ashish Nandy or even Partha Chatterjee. They tended to invoke civil society as a substitute of the modernist state. For them the project of reviving civil society is primarily a traditionalist agenda where the modernising state is identified as a source of many of the problems being faced by contemporary Indian society. Their main attack has been on the very project of modernity. They, in their writings, have been emphasising on the point that if we Indians have lost our bearings as a nation-state it is because we have been dismissive of our cultural roots.

While communitarians find fault with modern institutions and the modern state, they invariably tended to be blind towards the problems that the traditional institutions may pose to the ideal of democratic living. The communitarians, Gupta argues, did not talk about the internal contradictions that existed in the traditional communities. They see communities as self-regulating and non-contradictory groups and the horizon of tradition is projected as being packed with well-meaning individuals sworn to fraternity and principles of tolerance.

This, according to Gupta, is not the way in which civil society was classically understood. When it was first talked about by scholars like Locke, Rousseau and Hegel, or later in the writings of de Tocqueville, it referred to intermediary institutions and they were "born of the same drive and impulse that brought about the modern state". Gupta pleads that we ought to recognise the fact that the ideas of civil society and citizenship are modern phenomena. "The primary task of civil societies", according to Gupta, "is that of constituting a community of citizens bound by the ethics of freedom and not by particulars of hierarchy and tradition, or by the rational-legal calculus of the market place".

Gupta is a committed advocate of the idea of civil society. The idea of civil society becomes particularly important today because the old faith in socialist or capitalist systems as a solutios to all our problems has been proved wrong. The state too has failed to deliver what it had promised. Civil society could be a possible alternative. Locating himself in the liberal tradition, Gupta argues that such a framework of the civil society and citizenship could help us deal with the questions of equality and fraternity. In the following chapters he takes up two of the most important issues — . the affirmative action in favour of the historically underprivileged sections like the Scheduled Castes in India and the question of the rights of minorities. Such questions, Gupta argues, could be best dealt with if they were translated into the language of rights by bringing the question of citizenship to the centre stage.

A lot of thinking and hard work has gone into the writing of this book. The book is full of new and provocative ideas and needs to be read carefully. Though different chapters gel together well, they can also be read independently of each other. The chapter on civil society, for example, not only offers a new perspective on the subject but also provides a very useful survey of the Indian debate on the subject. Students as well as teachers of sociology and those in other social science disciplines would find the book useful.