ojpcr_3_1cchchbchbc

Online Journal for Peace and Conflict Resolutions <../../sites/ojpcr.html>

*Online Journal for Peace and Conflict Resolution* <../../sites/ojpcr.html>

March 2000 <ojpcr_3_1toc.html>

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* /The Indian National Project: Failures and Successes/ *
By Jill Starr ^* <#note*>

I. Introduction

This paper analyzes several strands of nonwestern Indian nationalist
discourse as a response to British colonial subjugation of India and its
consequential results. These nonwestern strands of Indian nationalism
and their associated discourse historically and sociologically evolved
in reaction to the British colonization of India. This paper analyzes
both the failures and successes of the Indian national project of modern
state formation within a distinct theoretical framework. This framework
measures the extent to which nonwestern Indian nationalism in response
to British colonial subjugation required certain liberally tolerant
civic/political and social/economic equitable reforms to be incorporated
into it in order to construct a liberated and tolerant modern
multicultural state. The reason for its failure is primarily due to
nonwestern Indian nationalism and its discourse being based upon an
extremely exclusionary national theoretical framework. In other words
nonwestern Indian nationalism and its discourse was premised primarily
on Hinduism. Therefore, nonwestern Indian nationalism failed to imaginea
manner in which India's numerous, diversified, non-Hindu, culturally
conceived imagined communitiesand social groupings would also be
incorporated into its future equitably.

Modern India and its leaders (past and present), due to India's colonial
past, have lacked sustaining vertical and horizontal political and
social legitimacy. Hence India is an unstable and weak democratic state
in transition. Paradigmatic of most post-colonial states, modern Indian
rulers maintain social control and political authority over the
communities they rule by often resorting to coercive internal state
security methods including despotic authoritarianism, secret police, and
state surveillance. Post-colonial India has also been impotent in
compelling its civil society to comply with Western models of secular
styled democracy and constitutional rule of law. Additionally, India's
civil society has been largely unreceptive in adopting Western-styled
secular democratic governance. This is partially attributed to the
British colonialists leaving many localized and scattered power vacuums
in India when they departed. These have since been filled by local
Indian rulers in many of India's more traditionally ruled decentralized
rural village communities, which exist far removed from India's modern
political capitol in Dehli.

The Indian national project and its nonwestern strands of Indian
nationalist discourse that were a part thereof were as striking a
failure as a success. Indian nationalism was, theoretically, a success
insofar as it resulted in constructing an independent nation-state
liberated from British rule. However, it was an equally striking failure
insofar as it failed to construct a tolerant modern multicultural
nation-state in which all cultures, regardless of race, religion,
gender, and creed would be integrated into it (i.e., post-colonial
India) equally. Consequently, the liberated independent post-colonial
state of India as a national project failed in resolving its continuous
intercultural contentions from Kashmir to Madras. Therefore, this paper
argues that Indian nationalism was as striking a failure as it was a
success when considering the extent to which post-colonial India brought
substantially tolerant equality to its citizenry regarding both
civic/political and social/economic human rights. Drastically failing to
imagineIndia's future liberated national state identity as an integrated
multicultural community respecting, and tolerating equally, India's many
non-Hindu, culturally conceived imagined communities (Anderson, 1991) is
the means by which the Indian national project fails in containing its
present intercultural contentions.

By the mid-19^th century, Indian nationalists responded to British
colonial subjugation by developing their own distinct, nonwestern,
anti-colonial national liberation discourse. Indian nationalism
eventually culminated in several cataclysmic historical world events
having modern day salience:

   1. liberating India from British colonial rule;
   2. establishing an independent post-colonial state of India;
   3. the tragically devastating humanitarian disaster that was the
      partition of India in 1947.

These three momentous world events forever impacted international
foreign relations and political economy. Hence, analyzing the
evolutionary historical development of British colonialism and
nonwestern Indian nationalism as a response to it is crucial. Such
insight is particularly instrumental in both understanding and resolving
modern conflicts arising between Western European, liberal democratic
states and nonwestern and/or marginally liberal democratically governed
states in political transition such as India.

II. Anderson and Chatterjee's Contempory Salience

The contemporary salience of Benedict Anderson's book, /Imagined
Communities/, and Partha Chatterjee's book, /A Nation and Its
Fragments/,/ /cannot be overstated, although the authors differ in their
explanatory theories of nationalism itself. Notwithstanding, the
conflagrations of worldwide nationalism and genocidal civil wars
currently existing in nonwestern geo-political domains and their social
spaces, such as in Bosnia, Kosovo, Kasmir, and elsewhere, neither have
any end in sight nor many plausible political solutions for peaceful
resolutions. Therefore, the nationalist theories put forth by Chatterjee
and Anderson are extremely instrumental in assisting both political
leaders and scholars in the East and West to better understand one
anothers' political and cultural standpoints regarding these
predominantly nonwestern nationalist movements for self-determination
feeding on the fuel of nationalism.

Whereas Anderson explains the origins and spread of nationalism from a
primarily Western European viewpoint, Chatterjee speaks of nonwestern
nationalism. Understanding both the Western and Eastern views of
nationalism is crucial for politicians and peacemakers. Yet, this
bicultural understanding of nationalism, although very much needed
within today's international relations and diplomatic purviews, has
largely remained an unfilled void.

Anderson conceptualizes Western European nation-state formation positing
that Western liberal democratically governed states formed primarily due
to their intrinsic national superiority to the nonwestern cultures they
conquered and colonized like India. Anderson also asserts that, as the
Western European Imperialist powers conquered nonwestern peoples, it was
the nonwestern cultures that eventually submitted to the Western
cultural stance, as a result they were then brought under its sphere of
cultural influence. Eventually, according to Anderson, Indian nonwestern
culture assimilated itself into Western European culture by its adoption
of Western beliefs and cultural values. However, if Anderson's theory
was entirely correct, India would have remained under British colonial
rule and this is obviously not the case.

A contemporary crisis that critiques Anderson's view on nationalism is
modern France, a country taking great pride in its record for
assimilating nonwestern immigrants. However, France is encountering
grave problems, such as being accused of violating the human rights of
its nonwestern Muslim minority in attempts to assimilate and integrate
its immigrants into mainstream majority French culture. Recently,
France's minority Muslim populations have strongly resented this French
assimilation policy. The Muslim minority residing within France has been
asserting their collective human rights and demanding greater cultural
self-determination within France itself by rejecting French assimilation
and its idea of imposing itself unwillingly on Muslim French citizens
who are unwilling to espouse majority French national culture
altogether. The French government is known for:

    " . . . weaving foreign settlers into the supposedly seamless fabric
    of French society. Unlike the multicultural approach of the United
    States or Britain, the aim of France is sufficiently to temper or
    blur the particular cultural and religious characteristics of the
    newcomer to make him indistinguishable (as far as possible) from the
    natives [French]. He may have dark skin or crinkly black hair, but
    he must come to accept the /Gauls /as his ancestors. He must eat
    French food, wear French clothes, observe French customs." ^1 <#note1>

Similar declarations make the French government's position clear in that
Islamic and other nonwestern cultural immigrants are not easily
tolerated within French constitutional law. In challenging this
position, the Muslim leader Kechat responded saying:

    "What is being asked of us is not integration but assimilation which
    requires us to leave our identity behind. Individuals can not be
    assimilated a community can not. A workable integration is one in
    which each party accepts the other as it is, with its own special
    culture. Our community is native born [French] and knows no other
    home. . . We have become part of the French family and accept our
    responsibilities to it. But we cannot be alone in making
    accommodations. As Muslims, our ideal is a totally Islamic society,
    but that is only an ideal. We know that in France, circumstances
    will not permit it." ^2 <#note2>

Hence Anderson's theory is very much analogous to this modern French
assimilation policy. Anderson's book title, /Imagined Communities/,
ironically, describes the current contentious cultural situation now
existing in modern France. It also brings one's attention to the similar
situation that existed within India during British colonial rule.

Both India then and France today, according to Anderson, are merely
examples of an imagined community. In Anderson's conception of the
imagined community, whenever the majority ruling culture becomes
oppressively overbearing toward its minority population, there is great
risk of genocidal civil war ensuing as occurred during India's
partition. Such a scenario not is manifest today in Kosovo as well as
elsewhere.

Although Anderson's work is very well articulated and accurately
describes Western nationalism, it falls short of explaining nonwestern
nationalism. Anderson's failure to explain how nonwestern Indian
nationalists could have conceivably succeeded in liberating themselves
from British colonialism by employing a nonwestern conceptualization of
nationalism not based on Western cultural ideals is the means by which
Anderson's model of nationalism has been viewed as eurocentric by some
scholars.

Anderson positions the classic origins of nationalism as emerging from
variant measurable mixtures of:

   1. Vernaculizing previously spoken sacred "religious" languages such
      as Church Slavonic, Hebrew, Arabic, and others.
   2. Print capitalism emerging and spreading standardized social,
      political, and economic "norms," among other information regarding
      trade and shipping, that led to the Industrial Revolution, modern
      day capitalism, and class division in a Marxist sense.
   3. Other predominant reasons Anderson presents for the pervasive
      spread of nationalism are new inventions of ideal types of
      nationalist symbols and other idioms such as lexicological terms
      that exclude, stereotype, and stress human differences in lieu of
      bridging human ideological gaps. Anderson refers to this syndrome
      as stressing a "them" relative to an "us" ideology.

Unlike Chatterjee, Anderson fails to give proper attention to nonwestern
nationalism and its methods that, unlike the secular civic nationalism
of the West, heavily draw upon the use of ideology and theology as the
primary means by which it spreads and operates. This point becomes
especially salient today as we witness one once great empire after
another being torn apart. Currently, in regions such as Africa, Iran,
Iraq, Cyprus, and Sri Lanka, the fact remains that Western European
secular democratic leaders seem incapable of fully grasping the
importance theology plays within nonwestern law, diplomacy, and
nationalism. For this reason, Western political leaders have very much
failed to either respect the power, or to fully comprehend the social
dynamics, of nonwestern nationalism and its methods for mobilizing
citizenry. However, as Chatterjee points out, this fact should not be
neglected when discussing the far-reaching implications of nonwestern
nationalism today, especially in India. These implications often result
in ethnic genocidal civil and tribal warfare, such as is manifest in
Uganda and Kashmir. Since Britain has been a foremost Western
imperialist power, Britain's imperialist nationalism in India will be
exemplary of Anderson's model of nationalism and its associated imagined
community.

Chatterjee, in choosing to analyze the nonwestern nation-state formation
process as it occurred within colonial India, clearly elucidates that
nonwestern Indian nationalists existed in India during British colonial
rule and that nonwestern nationalism exists as a powerful social and
ideological force today within Western and Eastern nation-states. As
Anderson points out, all modern nation-states, even those with colonial
roots, are merely imagined communities existing only because the
adhesive social glue binding them together, at least for the present
time, in the sociological imaginations of the uneducated masses in any
nation-state. Anderson's idea of secular civic nationalism is an example
of the strong social adhesive force binding together America's
multicultural society.

Chatterjee elucidates, however, that India is a nation-state composed of
many various nationalities all residing within the same geo-political
domain. However, these divergent social groupings possess bipolar
conceptualizations of their private and public distinct social spaces
and rarely have many commonalities in cultural and theological beliefs.
I strongly believe that neither the United States nor any other
nation-state today genuinely possesses a single national identity. This
owing to the historical axiom whereby many states, nations, and empires
have been as easily deconstructed as they have been reconstructed. It
would seem that the national social bonding adhesive of any country
consists only of nothing more than Anderson's conception of an imagined
community. If this is true, as Anderson posits, then the correct
combination of particular social solvents are capable of dissolving the
"nationness" bonding the peoples of any imagined community. This then
could allow political messiahs to surface in attempts to form new
nation-states according to their own conceptualizations of an imagined
community. Examples of such nation-state transitions have happened many
times during our world's history.

Anderson and Chatterjee do agree that the two predominant instruments of
nationalism are language and print capitalism, however Anderson spends
much more time discussing them. British colonialists considered
indigenous Indians inferior. Chatterjee points out, however, that these
two aforementioned nationalist tools were not exclusive to Western
nationalists, but were also actively used by Indian nationalists in
efforts to overthrow their Western oppressors.

Having discussed at length the manner in which Anderson vindicates the
verity that America and other similar Western nation-states today are no
more than imagined communities, I'd like to elevate the contemporary
salience of this discourse regarding Anderson's imagined community to
the realm of diplomacy and political international relations. The North
Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), European Union (EU), International
Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Bank may also then merely be
conceived of as merely global imagined communities. Global economic
political organizations are, after all, like nation-states today merely
composed of many various polarized concoctions and variant measured
mixtures of liberal, conservative, and other ideological ingredients.
Member states of these international global imagined communities such as
the United Nations often merely put forth the outward appearance of
being a liberal democracy in order to obtain international recognition
from the powerful Western liberal "democratic" countries to obtain
financial loans.

In reality, the United Nations is constituted of many member states that
will probably never share in any single universal international
identity, but will continue to profess to have one. Hence I suggest
seriously reconsidering whether imposing liberal democratic, secular
national values upon the unwilling subjects residing within nonliberal,
nonwestern states is wise.

Global imperialism and the threat of Western military intervention such
as the NATO's intervention in Kosovo was neither necessary nor was it
the correct manner in which to achieve greater world peace. Such
impositions of Western values on the unwilling human populations
residing within nonwestern social spheres is not wisdom, as the recent
proliferation of world terrorism and the bombings of both the Kenya and
Tanzania U.S. Embassys manifest. These and similar political practices
of imperialist international relations will never produce a 21^st
century in which international relations are more peaceable for our
future world's posterity. In fact, a valid question is also how many
years the United States has left before it also meets an untimely
demise, similar to that of the Ancient Roman Empire, if it does not
alter its present political, military, and diplomatic trajectory.

No analysis of Anderson's work would be complete without discussing
"print capitalism." Historical revisionism and hegemonic control of the
standards of any country's educational textbooks so texts no longer tell
the truth about history, such as the American Indian genocide committed
during the Jacksonian Era, should be neglected in studying nationalism.
National poetry and literature is often written to extol one state or
nation while positioning another as inferior.

Furthermore, powerful political interest groups in every country work to
promote certain national news media coverage over other. Language can
very much act as Anderson suggests, as an instrument for excluding one
national group from another and isolating each group. Thereafter, the
two groups cannot understand each another. The British and Indian
cultures were eventually only able to engage in a national discourse
that, of course, excluded the other. This single act greatly fostered
the nationalism that occurred in India at that time between different
competing national groups. Anderson also discusses how the diffusion of
national identities globally through social contacts such as
intermarriage and trade have been tools of nationalism. Now I turn to
Chatterjee.

III. Chatterjee's Nonwestern Nationalism

Let no one be fooled, nationalism is about consolidation and ascent to
power, nation-state building and exploiting for profit entire ethnic
groups of any particular culture by those considering themselves
superior. Therefore racism and nationalism are intertwined and
interdependent upon each other for survival. In order to fully
comprehend how the British failed in sustaining their colonial rule in
India, it is necessary to understand that the British only conceived of
nationalism in an extremely limited, ethnocentric, Western
philosophical, unilateral sense. The British colonial conceptualization
of nationalism was incapable of either comprehending or recognizing any
nationalism not based exclusively on Western themes, models, and
paradigmatic ideals. Therefore, the British were as unprepared as they
were unable to fully realize and deal with what became to them an
insidious, Indian, nonwestern, national, liberation-oriented social
movement. Hence, they were unable to halt Indian nationalism before it
was both overpowering and too late. Had British colonialists been able
to recognizably conceive that there could exist a powerful, nonwestern
nationalism not based purely upon Western cultural ideals, then perhaps
the British would have been more prepared to do battle against it.
However, due to Western European ethnocentricity, envisaging such a
scenario was beyond British colonial abilities at that time and,
largely, still is today.

This narrow, delimiting, Western conception of nationalism is referred
to throughout this paper and represents the model of nationalism
Anderson speaks of in /Imagined Communities./ As mentioned previousely,
Anderson's nationalist model is used as the exemplary model of Western
European nationalism espoused by the British colonialists during the
their colonial rule in India. Chatterjee, however, analyzes nonwestern
nationalism as used by indigenous Indian nationalists in their
successful subvertion of British colonialism in India. Chatterjee,
therefore, offers scholars of nationalism a much more solid
understanding of the reasons why it is vital for Western powers to both
respect and comprehend the cultural integrity of nonwestern traditional
cultures. Chatterjee's point is that it is crucial for the Western
powers neither to dismiss nonwestern cultures nor their theological
views as inferior.

In response to Anderson's Western European ethnocentricity regarding his
disputable claim that all future and past nationalism and its associated
liberation movements in India and elsewhere were modeled solely from
Western theoretical paradigms, Chatterjee states:

    "I have one central objection to Anderson's argument. If nationalism
    in the rest of the world have to chose their imagined community from
    certain 'modular' forms already made available to them by Europe and
    the America's, what do they have left to imagine"? ^3 <#note3>

Chatterjee's statement does not invalidate Anderson's fundamental theme
regarding the generalized instrumental tools used to spread nationalism
rather it greatly augments it. Chatterjee gives scholars of Indian and
other nonwestern nationalism a more productive model in which to analyze
it. He also raises many new important questions about nationalism
itself, such as asking whose imagined community is being conceived of
simultaneously by which polarized social groupings? Also, in what manner
do these divergent cultures conceive of constructing their own distinct
imagined community relative to their rivals in their own individual and
collective sociological imaginations and in which geo-political locales?
Uncovering the answers to these and other important questions regarding
nonwestern culture and nationalism is often a social science practice
ignored by secular-style social scientists in the West. However,
employing an overly zealous positivist model is extremely restrictive as
well. Using a more culturally relative model, as I propose, would
greatly assist Western scholars of the political and social sciences to
better understand and resolve international relations disputes regarding
nationalism as well as war and peace within nonwestern governed countries.

Chatterjee correctly elucidates the reason for which myriad polarized
historical accounts exist with respect to India's colonial era, each
offering different historical perspectives; Chatterjee believes these
different historical accounts are entirely contingent upon exactly whose
imagining the Indian colonial community being written of and when.
Chatterjee also points out that the persons imagining these different
and often bipolar Indian communities are imagining them in ways that
extol and preserve their own specific culture by claiming that it is
superior to another whether it be the British colonialists or the
nonwestern Indian nationalists. Unlike Anderson, Chatterjee recognizes
that language and print capitalism, as two traditional nationalist
tools, have been used and abused over the centuries by the Western
European powers and that they can successfully be used by nonwestern
Indian nationalists, Kosovo Serbs, Albanian nationalists, Kurds, and
others.

Chatterjee points out that nonwestern Indian nationalists had imagined
an independent Indian state in a very nonwestern manner by using
nonwestern cultural ideals, a notion Anderson rejects. However, history
reveals that imagining a future liberated Indian nation-state free from
British colonial subjugation was indeed imagined in a manner that was
completely foreign to the Western British colonial mind. It is for this
reason that Indian nationalists were able to take the British
colonialists by surprise, so to speak, and subvert colonial rule in India.

However this was never an easy task since indigenous Indian newspapers
and books underwent serious and grave censorship by British colonialists
in attempts to silence and destroy their anti-colonial opposition. The
Western European colonizers desperately tried to permeate Indian culture
with their Western language, cultural beliefs, and ideals in further
attempts to obliterate and strangle the indigenous Indian pre-colonial
culture and its language. This has been a long vindicated verity of the
first wave of Western European imperialist colonialism in India and
South East Asia, among others, during that time period as the words of
the Jesuit Priest Fermin de Vargus himself reveal:

    "All these dusky races are very stupid and vicious, and of the
    basest spirits . . . As for the mesticos and casticos, we should
    receive very few of them or none at all; especially the mesticos,
    since the more native blood they have, the more they resemble the
    Indians and the less they are esteemed by the Portugese." ^4 <#note4>

Eventually an anti-colonial national liberation discourse emerged within
India as the leaders of this indigenous Indian nationalist liberation
movement used their own nonwestern language, history, and theology to
construct a nationalism specifically designed for excluding the Western
colonial powers and their foreign mind from entering into it. This
nationalism possessed its own intrinsic, private, nonwestern nationalist
social domain and two spheres of influence, which I will discuss later
in this paper. Having now discussed in length the background of Indian
Nationalism, I now turn to the Indian National Project, its successes
and failures.

IV. The Historical Development of Nonwestern Indian Nationalism

The nationalism manifest today in India from Kashmir to Madras
originated during British colonial rule. Before British colonialism
emerged in India, India's diverse culturally conceived imagined
communities had coexisted for centuries without the manifestations of
both partition and ethnic genocidal civil war to the extent they
occurred in 1947 or today. The evolutionary historical social
developments eventually culminating in the partition of India date as
far back as the 18^th century. During the 18^th century, British
colonialists coercively spread open and penetrated India's geo-political
borders and public and private social spaces against India's will. Siba
N'Zatioula Grovogui claims Catholicism acted as a potent agent in
actively undertaking this colonial task.

    "This is most pronounced in 1493 when the Papal Bulls of Alexander
    VI promised spiritual salvation to all non-Europeans such as Indians
    and Africans under a European-dominated Christian world order. The
    pontiff at the time used the Iberian monarchies of Spain and
    Portugal to undertake this promised redemption to the 'Indian'
    people under imposed spiritual guidance, political domination, and
    unrestricted access to Indian territories and resources as necessary
    requirements of their so-called civilizing mission." ^5 <#note5>

Grovogui continues:

    "The Christian inspired universe . . . established hierarchical and
    exploitative relations between its Christian subjects and the other
    [Indians/South Asians/Africans]. This system appropriated [Indians]
    . . . as the objects of discourse to be 'settled down' [stripped of
    essential communal rights within the European dominated
    international order]." ^6 <#note6>

British colonialism engaged India's diversified indigenous imagined
communities with a new confrontation arising from European expansion and
its increasing exploitation of nonEuropean Indians. This exploitative
relationship organized around a set of Western European values whose
ideological philosophic system had arisen during the Enlightenment Era
and has since served to politically guide the Western European praxis.
In fact, Lorimer maintains this position regarding Indians and other
non-Europeans:

    "These so-called non-progressive races. . . they [to Lorimer] lacked
    Enlightenment Era's reason and science and indeed had not produced
    'one single individual who has been distinguished in any
    intellectual pursuit'." ^7 <#note7>

For example, even prior to India's national liberation in 1947, the
rights and privileges regarding the sovereignty and self-determination
of India's indigenous cultural communities were completely controlled by
the British colonial authorities. And later, during India's
decolonization process, the high-minded Western powers established a
protectorate over India. This British protectorate imposed Western
conceptions of politics, economics, and universal human rights doctrines
upon India's nonwilling subjects and indigenous communities. These
Western cultural impositions took precedence over India being granted
the civic and political human rights to construct a distinctly
nonwestern political government domain in which nonwestern conceptions
of communal, collective social, economic, and basic human rights could
be incorporated without British intervention.

After Britain committed the aforementioned transgression of penetrating
India, Britain proceeded to move forward with its ill-willed colonial
plans for establishing full hegemonic ideological, economic, military,
and political social control over India's numerous culturally conceived
imagined communities and the constituents and rulers thereof. Employing
both auspice and intrigue, Britain's East Indian Trading Company acted
as the instrumental tool by which India's many indigenous, culturally
conceived imagined communities were systematically pervaded by British
colonialism. British colonialism attempted to absolutely rule India by
establishing Western European social practices and principles very
foreign to the majority of India's indigenous population. This is one
reason why, in India, Anderson's concept of print capitalism emerged.

Print capitalism was used by both British colonialists and their
Western, educated, Indian, elite counterparts as an avenue for spreading
Western ideological concepts regarding liberalizing women's rights and
spreading Western family values in India as Chatterjee states:

    "It is the initiative of the East Indian Trading Company and the
    European missionaries that the first printed books are produced in
    Bengali at the end of the 18^th century . . . at the beginning of
    the first half of the 19^th century . . . English completely
    displaces formerly spoken Persian . . . and emerges as the most
    powerful vehicle of intellectual influence." ^8 <#note8>

British colonizers efforts to convert India's indigenous Hindu
communities to Western Christian family values was met with resistance
from nonwestern Indian male nationalists:

    "Nonwestern Indian nationalists ridiculed [Western family values] by
    performing theatrical political/cultural parodies portraying Western
    family practices such as: Westernized [Indian] families, Western
    cosmetics, immodest Western clothing/shoes, and Western educated
    Indian wives as vulgar, immodest, and as neglecting their
    traditional responsibilities towards their husbands and homes." ^9
    <#note9>

An essay written by Bhudev Mukhopadhyay elucidates many of the problems
British colonialists encountered in trying to Westernize indigenous
Indian women. This was disturbing to male Indian nationalists who began
their own campaign comparing and contrasting Western women's behavior to
that of nonwestern traditional Hindu women. This brief excerpt regarding
family values claims the former as inferior to the latter:

    "Because of our [Indian indigenous] hankering for the external
    glitter and ostentation of the English way of life . . . an upheaval
    is underway within our homes . . . many reform movements are being
    conducted today; the education of women in particular is greatly
    being talked about. But we rarely hear of those great arts in which
    women were once portrayed [the great arts represented traditional
    Hindu femininity and culture and were revitalized by Indian male
    nationalists as the appropriate gender behavioral norms for
    indigenous Indian women.]". ^10 <#note10>

The book entitled/ Sunlight on a Broken Column/ shows how alien Western
ways were inserted into the traditional nonwestern Muslim home. The book
describes a Muslim family living in India during the time of British
rule in which one sister marries a Muslim man later inducted into the
British Civil Service. They then both travel to Western Europe. Upon
their return, the younger sister, who remained behind in India, can
hardly recognize her elder sister's Westernized personality. After
witnessing a display of her sister's new Western style, such as
attending diplomatic parties in European dresses and her new political
stance, the younger sister, Laila, speaks of the estrangement she feels
toward her sister after she returned from the West.

    "Zahra had changed very much in her appearance, speech, and
    mannerisms . . . she was playing the part of the modern wife as she
    had once played the part of the dutiful /purdah/ [Muslim custom of
    secluding women] girl. Her present sophistication suited to her role
    as her past modesty had been. Just had she said her prayers five
    times a day, she now attended social functions." ^11 <#note11>

The official agents of the East Indian Trading Company (both British
colonialists and their indigenous Indian elite allies) primarily
preoccupied themselves with the imperialist task of incessantly invading
and impregnating India's many indigenous, culturally conceived imagined
communities with an alien ideal type of Western European seed. This task
required the East Indian Trading Company and its collaborative agents
(British and Indian indigenous elites) set in place a self-perpetuating
expansive system. ^12 <#note12> This system would, thereafter, function
to reproduce, implant, and then breed, Western European-styled
institutional social structures inside India's indigenous, culturally
conceived imagined communities for the purpose of dominating,
subjugating, exploiting, and controlling them for monetary profit.
Inserting these Western European-styled institutional social structures
into India's numerous indigenous imagined communities was meant to
further assist Britain in successfully implementing its ill-willed
colonial plans for establishing absolute economic and socio-political
hegemony over India in order to acquire great unmitigated economic
profit by exploitation. Barrington Moore states that:

    "In the middle of the 18^th century the British were still organized
    for commerce and plunder in the /Honorable /East India Company and
    controlled no more than a fraction of Indian territory. By the
    middle of the 19^th century they had become in effect the rulers of
    India, organized in a bureaucracy proud of its tradition of justice
    and fair dealing [sarcastically speaking that is since the company
    was] a company of 'merchants' not so easily distinguished from
    pirates on the one hand and a series of decaying Oriental despotisms
    on the other . . . Pressing this sociological and historical paradox
    even further: from this equally unpromising amalgam there eventually
    emerged a [so-called Western state in India claiming to have] valid
    claims to democracy!" ^13 <#note13>

Britain's overall colonial plan to exploit and appropriate India of its
land, labor, and natural resources eventually backfired when British
colonialists mistakenly overstepped the boundaries of their own colonial
foreign power and authority. Britain's East Indian Trading Company had
originally penetrated India's nonwestern geo-political borders and
public and private social spheres with the intent of expanding and
protecting the profitable trading networks they had already established
on India's subcontinent. These trading contacts bestowed unto the East
Indian Trading Company increasing accumulations of enormous material and
monetary wealth (by trading with India's merchant classes and with
various members of both the Mughal and Vijayanagara Empires) in the
early part of the 18^th century. ^14 <#note14> However, during the mid-
to late 18^th century, agents of Britain's East Indian Trading Company
not only demanded economic hegemony over India, but also demanded
cultural, customary, and theological hegemony over India's numerous
indigenous nonwestern imagined communities, their leaders, and their
constituents. In other words, Britain expanded its original prime
colonial focus in India from merely establishing economic hegemony over
India's public worldly materialistic sphere by dominating and
subjugating India for capitalist profit by exploitation to also
establishing hegemony over India's nonwestern private social-spiritual
sphere (familial, cultural, and spiritual).

British colonialists undertook this task by trying to conquer India's
nonwestern imagined communal populations by imposing Christianity upon
them along with Western European normative social standards of behavior.
In doing so, both the British colonialists and their elite indigenous
Indian collaborators had left themselves wide open to a planned
subversion by Indian indigenous nationalists.

Formulating nonwestern Indian nationalist liberation ideology required
that indigenous Indian nationalists cultivate a way in which they could
selectively incorporate certain necessary materialistic aspects
(political, military, and economic) of Western modern culture into the
nonwestern Indian national project and its discourse while rejecting
others. By the mid-19^th century, indigenous Indian nationalists had
commenced a nonwestern Indian national liberation discourse and project
in response to, and to counteract, all British colonial attempts to
conquer, convert, and o denigrate India's public and private social
domains. It was perceived to be many times more insidiously sinister,
and it also was very embarrassing for India's indigenous male
nationalists, to allow India's traditional culturally defined nonwestern
private social sphere to be conquered and colonized along with also
India's materialistic, public, political one. Chatterjee states the
reason for this was:

    "The [materialistic world] was a place where the European power had
    challenged the non-European peoples and by virtue of its superior
    material culture, had subjugated them. But it had failed to colonize
    [India's] inner, essential, identity of the East which lay in its
    distinctive and superior spiritual culture. That is where the East
    was undominated, sovereign, and master of its own fate. For a
    colonized people the world was a distressing [and embarrassing]
    constraint [especially for Indian males attempting to maintain their
    masculinity] forced upon it by the fact of its material weakness. It
    was a place of daily humiliation, a place where the norms of the
    colonizer had to be accepted . . . No encroachments of the colonizer
    must be allowed [by Indian males if they were to maintain dignity
    under colonial oppressive conditions] in that inner sanctum. In the
    world, imitation and adaptation to Western norms was a necessity; at
    home, they were tantamount to annihilation of ones very [Indian male
    identity]." ^15 <#note15>

Hence Indian indigenous nationalists constructively framed a manner in
which India's traditional, culturally defined private social sphere
would be portrayed as necessitating both revitaliztion and recapture
from British colonialists. Furthermore, India's materialistic worldly
public economic domain (work, politics, military, and monetary profit)
would eventually also have to become liberated by India's nonwestern
national liberation movement as it was conceived by Indian nationalists.
Chatterjee summarizes this new emergent nonwestern Indian nationalist
discourse in referring to Western European reformation of certain
abusive Indian cultural customs such as /Sati/ to enhance human rights
for women:

    " . . . in the phase of social reforms in the nineteenth century, we
    are tempted to put this [nonwestern Indian nationalist sentiment]
    down as 'conservatism', a mere defense of 'traditional' norms' [by
    Indian indigenous nationalists]. But this would be a mistake. The
    colonial situation, and the ideological response of nationalism,
    introduced an entirely new substance to these terms and effected
    their transformation. The material/spiritual dichotomy, to which the
    terms 'world' [India's nonwestern public political and economic
    sphere] and 'home' [India's nonwestern private sphere of family and
    religion] corresponded, and acquired . . . a very special
    significance in the Indian [nonwestern nationalist discourse and]
    mind. The world was where the European power had challenged the
    non-European peoples and by virtue of its own superior material
    [public political, military, economic, and] culture, had subjugated
    them [Indians]. But it had failed to colonialize the inner
    [spiritual, familial, and cultural space], essential, identity of
    the East [Indian traditional culture] which lay in its distinctive,
    and superior, spiritual culture [the way Indian indigenous
    nationalists conceptualized it]." ^16 <#note16>

Thus nonwestern Indian nationalism can be conceived of as both a
dialogue of resistance to and an attempted liberation from British
colonial rule. It was also formulated as a nonwestern Indian nationalist
discourse for the purpose of directing itself against the British
colonial Western European pervasion of India's public and private social
spheres. Furthermore, it acted as an anti-colonial defense against the
constant insidiously asserted ethnocentric presumptions emanating
directly from various members of India's indigenous, elite,
Western-educated /intelligentsia/ and from British colonialists. In this
sense, Indian nonwestern nationalist discourse was developed in efforts
to assault, undermine, and destroy Britain's strongly held obtrusive
invasion on both India's nonwestern public and private social domains.
Chatterjee clarifies this concept saying:

    " . . . [nonwestern Indian] nationalist ideology in its struggle
    against the dominance of colonialism and the resolution it offered .
    . . was built around a separation of the domain of culture into two
    spheres-the material and the spiritual. It was in the material
    sphere that the claims of Western civilization were the most
    powerful. Science, technology, rational forms of economic
    organization, modern methods of statecraft, these had given the
    European countries the strength to subjugate non-European peoples
    and to impose their dominance over the whole world. To overcome this
    domination, the colonized people must learn these superior
    techniques of organizing material life and incorporate them within
    their own culture. This was one aspect of the national project
    [Indian national project] of rationalizing and reforming their
    people." ^17 <#note17>

Moreover, nonwestern Indian nationalism both fed upon and was fueled by
its own intrinsic intolerance to Western European colonial attempts
aimed at subverting the distinct, nonwestern, indigenous imagined
community concepts of India's private and public social spheres. ^18
<#note18> Indigenous Indian nationalists had to subject their lives to
the shameful embarrassment derived from their British colonial
domination and subjugation within their daily public materialist social
sphere in order to survive. However, they inexorably refused to
relinquish to British colonialists any control over their Indian
nonwestern private sphere.

    "But this [nonwestern Indian nationalism] could not mean the
    imitation of the West in every aspect of life, for then the very
    distinction between the East and the West would vanish-the
    self-identity of national culture would itself be threatened. In
    fact, Indian nationalists argued that it was not only undesirable to
    imitate the West in anything other than the material aspects of
    life, it was not even necessary to do so, because in the spiritual
    domain the East was superior to the West." ^19 <#note19>

Undertaking this task required Indian nationalists to distinguish
between Western Europe's worldly public materialist domain, consisting
of modern economics, the military, and secular political liberalism, and
India's, presumed by Indian nationalists, superior, private, Eastern,
traditional Hindu, spiritual, and familial domain. Hence, nonwestern
Indian nationalism in and of itself was a dichotomously paradoxical and
vexing nationalist discourse. It attempted to fuse together two
irreconcilably polarized social spheres into a single integrated
national (public/private) social identity (manifesting Anderson's
concept of the imagined community). It also tried accommodating all of
India's numerously diverse indigenous, culturally conceived imagined
communities. Since all such communities conceptualized their own
distinct communal society structure in very often polarized ways,
nonwestern Indian nationalist discourse eventually created many
irreconcilable interethnic ideological differences between these various
indigenous social communities, many of which remain today.

These cultural, theological, interethnic, and intercultural
irreconcilable differences are more fully elucidated by analyzing the
devastating consequences of India's partition in 1947 (between Hindus,
Muslims and other cultural, social, and theological groupings). This is
partially due to the British colonialists leaving India with a large
power vacuum in 1947. Colonialism no longer acted as the social adhesive
unifying force in India. Albeit oppressive, British colonialism was able
to unify most of India's Hindu, Muslim, and other minority cultural and
ethnic populations into Anderson's imagined community, at least temporarily.

In modern post-colonial India, the powerful central state apparatus has
been unable to command loyalty from Indian's diverse locally ruled rural
communities. This has given rise to many social contentions originating
from power struggles between Hindus, Muslims, and other communities,
another consequence of British colonialism leaving these aforementioned
power vacuums. Competition for India's political power eventually
culminated in the Indian-Pakistani partition in 1947. A primary reason
for India's partition was that the first post-colonial Indian leaders
had attempted to imitate in their own governance Western-styled
secularized and, supposedly, "neutral" democratic governance in which
all citizens are presumed equal, at least in political principle if not
actual objective political practice.

In India and other post-colonial states, an instance where grave
competition over which human rights should take preeminence over others
(civil/political, social/economic, or basic human rights) exists between
different ethnic communities and cultural clans, this can be indicative
of forthcoming genocidal civil war and/or political unrest. Such
conflicts originate and evolve from the dialectical tensions deriving
from power struggles between centralized state political rulers and
those they try rule over in localized, rural Indian village communities
using a Western model of secular-styled democratic governance.

Furthermore, India's nonwestern nationalists failed to consider that
constructing a strong, stable, multiculturally tolerant, viable
nation-state required, and could only be effectuated after, establishing
vertical and horizontal political legitimacy. Legitimizing state rule in
post-colonial India was never truly achieved by India's first
post-colonial political leaders as is evident by India's partition. Such
legitimacy is only gained if a healthy dialectic relationship exists
between those who rule and those they rule over. In other words, the
Indian indigenous population needed to possess an ideal-type of single,
shared, national, cultural identities with their rulers; this never
occurred in India as it does today in the United States. Hence, India
was a poor candidate for attempting to establish, as its first model of
government, a verbatim model of the Western-styled, secular, liberal
democratic government to begin with.

The problem derived from the fact that, in India, democracy had to
become more flexible. The usual Western, secular, democratic, liberal,
dogmatic model should never have conceivably been thought to be capable
of taking a firm root in India without some noteworthy revisions.
Generally speaking, seeking to establish and institutionalize a
secular-styled Western democracy in India at that time was ludicrous. In
India, establishing such a model for rule was bound to fail owing to the
fact that India's citizenry and their affiliated imagined communities
were then, and still are today, largely devoted to theology and its
associated customs (primarily Hindu and/or Muslim). Implementing in
India a Western-styled secular government was destined to fail and be
met with much opposition and even terrorism. India's rulers needed then,
and they need today, to slightly revise this dogmatically designed,
principled, Western-modeled secular governmental system based solely
upon separation of faith and state. What is needed in India is to
establish a manner in which democracy can accommodate Hindu and Muslim
theological practices. Theology in India needs to be an integral part of
and incorporated into India's Constitutional Rule of Law. By doing so,
the various Indian traditional customary practices of the Hindu and
Muslim theologies that are explicitly human rights violations can be
avoided by offering legal. constitutional protection against them.

I do however want to stress that constructing a workable theoretical
framework for achieving a political and cultural balance in which India,
the United States, and Britain can agree remains to be accomplished. The
great question will remain if Western politicians, human rights
advocates, traditional Indian nationalists, their associated Hindu
theological leaders, Indian women, Muslims, and other minorities can all
be reasonable enough to respect the integrity of everyone else's
cultural/theological standpoints.

A further question is whether the West can avoid imposing its Christian
values upon India's nonwestern theological culture and associated
imagined communities. So far, neither any plausible philosophic nor
political resolutions exist that can resolve these dialectic dilemmas
and tensions existing between human rights diplomats in India and the
West. Human rights, India's cultural and state sovereignty, and Western
military intervention seem to be intermeshed in a dangerous manner for
promoting Western human rights agendas in India and other nonwestern
social/political domains. However, resolving these issues will greatly
guide future war and peace in the 21^st century. These issues need to be
resolved rather than neglected.

Therefore, I argue that India's partition was largely due to India's
first political leaders failing to recognize the importance of
incorporating safeguards into Indian law that would have prevented
religious discrimination between Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, and others
before it was too late. It was inconceivable to think that a
secular-styled Western democracy could achieve success in India. Today,
the intercultural contentions in Sri Lanka, Kashmir, and Madras demand,
to a large degree, some theological resolution. However, due to the
Western "requirement" of so-called "third and fourth world states"
having to placate Western powers by proclaiming themselves as a
secular-styled democracy and the model of Western governance, this poses
a considerable problem for Indian politicians. Indian politicians desire
and need to obtain both international recognition and monetary loans
from Western powers. It would greatly help the situation if both the
World Bank and the IMF removed the requirement for obtaining loans that
India must espouse a Western secular government as one of their
conditions for obtaining necessary monetary benefits.

Whether India will placate its indigenous citizenry residing within its
geo-political boundaries or appease powerfully persuasive Western
financial architectures such as the IMF and World Bank to obtain Western
economic developmental aid and international recognition will continue
to exert and play a key role in international politics. These
aforementioned issues will determine whether the modern Indian
nation-state will continue to stay together and sustain its current
cohesion between India's rulers and ruled.

India today is paradigmatic of many West African states where tribal
kinship loyalties and local communal identities are completely
disinterested and disassociated with their national state government and
its pro-Western political agenda. The question posed is whether
multicultural and multipolar theologically comprised nation-states, like
India and Kosovo, will remain unified or eventually break apart, as
occurred in the Indian-Pakistani partition of 1947 and in the former
Yugoslavia. Since India's partition, many other former colonized states
are finding it increasingly difficult to stay together.

If India continues on its present unilateral trajectory of ruling by
using a false façade of democracy based on the Western myth referred to
as multicultural neutrality, eventually India could be thrust into a
future civil war and/or a partition. Notwithstanding, Indian
nationalists attempted to forge a single national Indian state identity
by, on the one hand, distinguishing it from and, on the other hand,
merging it with Western European political liberalism and its spirit of
free-market economic capitalism. They also tried constructing an
imagined Indian community liberated from British colonialism intolerant
of other cultures. It was exclusively created by nonwestern Indian Hindu
nationalists. This Indian nationalist project and its methods largely
failed to construct an integrated, national, political-social identity,
tolerant of cultures besides Hindu, in modern post-colonial India.

Nonwestern Indian nationalist discourse, in response to British
colonialism, was a war waged for more than one reason on more than one
battlefield. It was a war waged on an intellectual, spiritual, physical,
and materialistic multidimensional ideological battlefield. On its
physical/materialist, national liberation battlefront, it was a war
waged by Indian nationalists against British colonialists for the
purpose of subverting British colonialism and, thereafter,
reconsolidating and redistributing India's political power. On its
intellectual battlefront, nonwestern Indian nationalism was a battle
fought by Indian nationalists for both preserving and revitalizing
Indian traditional Hindu culture and theological ritual practices. As a
response, British colonialists themselves began establishing additional
Western-style educational facilities both inside and outside of India
for advancing their ill-willed task of destroying India's traditional
culture and its customary social practices and replacing them with
Western European social values, principles, and practices. As
Chatterjee's said:

    "Education and the history of India was nationally revised after the
    British established Western schools with Western revisionist leaning
    textbooks in India and education there . . . changed radically as
    the Bengali literati was schooled in the new colonial education. Now
    Indians were taught the principles of European history, statecraft
    and social philosophy." ^20 <#note20>

In this manner, the Western European values were being insidiously
inserted into traditional nonwestern Indian society through
Western-style educational facilities established within India. Western
values and social norms were taught through these Western institutions.
Moreover, Christian missionaries began a scholarly discourse in India's
Western-style university settings. Nonwestern Indian nationalists saw
this as a cultural cue to revitalize their own Indian culture and
reassert its dominance and social superiority. This was exactly what the
Bengali Renaissance was ideologically about. Unfortunately, in choosing
to resuscitate, revitalize, and rescue India's private, nonwestern,
Hindu domain and its associated cultural rituals and traditions, many of
the positive Western liberal reforms that had began to take hold, like
enhanced human rights for women, were undone. ^21 <#note21>

The spiritual/theological, national liberation, nonwestern battlefront
was one in which British colonialists, and many members of India's
indigenous Western-educated /intelligentsia/, took strong reformist,
religious positions allying themselves with Western Christianity in
order to reform and capitulate the practices advanced by certain
traditional Indian religious pundits. Western educated Indians tried
reforming the Hindu cultural practice of /sati/ (widow immolation), but
India's predominantly male, nonwestern nationals began seeking new ways
in which they could recast the former roles, meanings, and performances
of such explicit Indian human rights violations.

The Indian male nationalists claimed these Hindu cultural rituals and
practices were necessary for the salvation and liberation of the Indian
nation and to reestablish India's traditional social identity for the
creation of a future Indian state in a post-colonial liberated India.
Keshab, an Indian, Western-educated, religious nationalist, after
returning to India from London, did much damage to the liberal Western
reforms emanating previously from the Indian, Western-educated elite.
Rammohan Roy writes:

    "It is true that the people of India have been satisfied in some
    manner with what they have heard of Jesus, but they have been
    disappointed in a far greater measure. For England has sent unto us
    . . . a Western Christ. This is indeed regretted. Our countryman
    find that in this Christ sent by England, there is something that is
    not quite congenial to the native mind, not quite acceptable to the
    genius of the nation . . . Why must we bow before a foreign product?
    . . . Hundreds upon hundreds . . . stand back in moral recoil from
    this picture of a foreign Christianity trying to pervade and subvert
    Hindu society . . . and this repugnance" ^22 <#note22>

Only on the outside did the shape of nonwestern Indian nationalist
ideology resemble Western European secular capitalism in both principle
and practice, especially with respect to India's public sphere. This
sphere was traditionally a purview socially dominated by indigenous
Indian patriarchal males before British hegemony was established in
India. However on the inside, Indian nationalist ideology resembled more
the embodiment of rejuvenated nonwestern Indian traditional Hindu faith
and its associated culture in both practice and principle.

Indian nationalist discourse ridiculed Western European ways to further
undermine the Western ruling colonial authority in India. These cultural
critiques manifested themselves in the form of Indian nationalist
theatre, literature, political satire, textbooks, and paradigms of Hindu
theological and scholarly university discourse. Traditional Indian Hindu
culture therefore underwent a cultural and spiritual renaissance.
Ridiculing the West in the form of political satires also greatly
assisted Indian indigenous nationalists in rallying support to further
sponsor the nonwestern Indian nationalist social movement. Indian
nationalism was further disseminated by these Western cultural critiques
amid India's many indigenous cultural social groupings, including
elites, the middle classes, and peasants. However, in its rejuvenating
traditional Indian culture, Indian nationalism greatly stifled efforts
to reform and enhance the human rights of Indian women.

Rather, Indian nationalist discourse returned primary control of India's
private nonwestern spiritual and familial social sphere to Indian
patriarchal male figures. Such male figures were, in many ways, even
more oppressive toward women than Western European males due to Indian
male nationalists attempting to recapture and reassert the power they
felt they lost to their British colonial subjugators. It was for this
reason that indigenous male nationalists attempted to fully nullify the
liberalized human rights standards and Western behavioral norms.

These Western reforms were primarily aimed at liberalizing and weakening
the restrictive traditional stronghold that traditional Indian
patriarchy had upon Indian women. Chatterjee states:

    "Adjustments would have to be made in the external world of material
    activity, and men would bare the brunt of the task . . . But the
    crucial requirement was to retain the inner spirituality of
    indigenous social life. The home was the principle site for
    expressing the spiritual quality of the national culture and women
    must take the main responsibility of protecting and nurturing this
    quality. No matter what the changes in the external conditions of
    life for women; they must not lose their essentially spiritual
    [feminine Hindu] virtues; they must not in other words, become
    essentially, Westernized. It followed, as a simple criterion for
    judging the desirability of reform, that the essential distinction
    between the social roles of men and women in terms of material and
    spiritual virtues must at all be maintained." ^23 <#note23>

In direct opposition to British colonialists, the nonwestern Indian
nationalist ideology was aimed at constraining the freedoms and human
rights for indigenous Indian women. This is illustrated by Banerjee,
quoting a Western-educated, female, Indian nationalist defining her
conception of the proper social gender role for Indian women.

    "From the particular nature and capacities with which God had
    endowed women, it is quite clear that the subservience of women is
    God's will . . . Even if you are at the point of death, you should
    never speak ill of your husband to others." ^24 <#note24>

Hence, male-dominated Indian nationalist discourse centered itself on
constructing India's national liberation project in ways that
marginalized and oppressed Indian women. This is due to Indian
nationalism being an integral part of both India's public-social and
private realms.

Recapturing Western liberal ideology regarding the control of Indian
women was as important to Indian male nationalists as was liberating
India itself. Formulating the appropriate nonwestern Indian national
behavioral standards and the proper social behavioral norms for Indian
women was a major project of male Indian nationalists. They eventually
determined that the proper behavioral conduct for Indian women, with
respect to India's national liberation movement, was to uphold
traditional Indian culture and Hinduism (femininity and spirituality),
requiring Indian women to relearn what was supposedly their true Hindu
gender role (as it existed prior European hegemony in India).

Indian male nationalists restricted Indian women's human rights by
forcing them to conform to revitalized new nationalist mythological and
oppressive Hindu traditional customs. Demonstrating the manner in which
Indian women were imagined in the minds of nonwestern male Indian
nationalists, Chatterjee states:

    "The central principle by which nationalism resolved the women's
    question in terms of its own historical project . . . up to the
    present day [revolved around] . . . everyday life of the 'modern'
    woman?her dress, food, manners, education, her role in organizing
    life at home, her role outside the home . . . specific solutions
    were drawn from a variety of sources?a reconstructed 'classical'
    tradition, modernized folk forms . . . the legal idea of equality in
    a liberal democratic state [was] . . . neither predetermined or
    unchanging, but its form was consistent with the system of
    dichotomies [between the private and public spheres shaping the
    overall Indian nonwestern] nationalist project." ^26 <#note26>

Therefore, Indian indigenous women were sent to specially built Indian
educational facilities serving to instruct them in their proper gender
roles. The redefinition and reassertion of these dogmatically rigid
gender constraints upon Indian women, many of whom were previously
liberated to a large extent by Western reforms, was quite an oppressive
experience for most Indian women. New patriarchal oppression by Indian
male nationalists towards women took the form of portraying Indian women
as enlightened in thought, word, and deed relative to Western European
women. In an essay written by Radharani Lahiri this is clearly manifest:

    "Of all the subjects that women might learn, housework is the most
    important . . . whatever knowledge she may acquire, she cannot claim
    any reputation unless she is proficient in housework." ^27 <#note27>

Many Indian male nationalists did, however, speak of the need for Indian
women to become more educated. They believed Indian women needed to
cultivate virtues such as chastity, self-sacrifice, and absolute
submission to Indian men in the labors of sex. This ideological point of
view forced an oppressive and revitalized Hindu gender role upon Indian
women and established a new patriarchal oppressive order upon Hindu
women. In fact, Indian women ended up under the domination and
subjugation of Indian male nationalists rather than the British
colonialists.

Another reason for which Indian nationalism was so psychologically bent
on forcing strict traditional Indian patriarchal standards upon Indian
women was that it was a way in which male Indian nationalists could
explicitly reject Western European Christian values. This was especially
prevalent after the British sent many indigenous Indians to be educated
in England, where they saw the inconsistencies in Christian beliefs and
actions. Clarifying this point is Western-educated, Indian, religious
nationalist Keshab speaking about Britain's Christianity and its being
preached yet not practiced:

    "[There he saw] vast amounts of poverty and pauperism . . . so much
    moral and spiritual dissolution, and physical suffering, caused by
    intemperance . . . [and in referring to British colonialist
    criticism of the Indian caste system he says he did not] . . .
    "expect to find in this country . . . caste. Your rich people are
    really Brahmans, and your poor people are Sudras [untouchables, the
    lowest level of social outcasts in the Indian caste system]." ^28
    <#note28>

Keshab, in his farewell address when leaving London, continued:

    "Christian life in England is more materialistic outwardly than
    spiritual inward . . . In England there is hardly anything like
    meditation and solitary contemplation." ^29 <#note29>

Male Indian nationalists viewed British missionaries as insulting both
their distinctly Indian cultural integrity and the honor of Indian
traditional theology (Hinduism) within Indian culture. Indian
theological customary practices were polarized to those encompassed
within Western Christianity. Sacred Hindu religious textual scriptures
became merely another battlefront for which Indian nationalists waged
war with Indian, Western-educated elites and competed for power. In
debating whether practices such as/ sati /should be legalized in India,
the reality was that both British and Indian male nationalists were
merely concerned with trying to sustain holds on their social power
apparatus instead of seriously caring about real issues of human rights
reform for Indian women.

Therefore, many of India's exceedingly abusive practices towards women
were recast and reestablished while the British colonialists turned a
blind eye. These Hindu rituals were, presumably, reestablished by male
Indian nationalists to protect India's nonwestern civilization from
being both obliterated, polluted, and culturally strangled by British
colonial attempts to convert it to Christianity and Western European
social standards as Lata Mani states:

    "Tradition was thus not the ground on which the status of women was
    being contested. Rather the reverse was true: women in fact became
    the site on which tradition was debated and reformulated. What was
    at stake was not women but tradition." ^30 <#note30>

Chatterjee also agrees stating:

    " . . . irrespective of wealth and social status, until the middle
    of the 19^th century, of the use of Western cosmetics and jewelry,
    of the reading of novels . . . [such Western activities were]
    considered a useless and expensive pastime . . . .the literature of
    parody and satire in the first half of the early nineteenth century
    . . . was prompted by a straightforward protection of
    'tradition'[Indian post-colonial] nation." ^31 <#note31>

The next section will more intensely inquire into the social development
of nonwestern Indian nationalist discourse as a response to British
colonialism in India.

V. The Social Dynamics of British Colonialism and Indian Nationalism

Chatterjee, in his primary objection to Anderson, argued that not all
types of nationalism are based on Western European models:

    "I have one central objection to Anderson's argument. If
    nationalisms in the rest of the world have to choose their imagined
    community from certain 'modular' forms already made available to
    them by Europe and the America's, what do they have to imagine . . .
    ?" ^32 <#note32>

Therefore it is presumed that, since Indian nationalism had indeed
managed to subvert British colonialism in India, nonwestern Indian
nationalist discourse struck British colonialism in its heart when it
was not looking. Obviously, Britain had a great deal of monetary wealth
to lose if it lost colonial rule of India. Therefore, we can deduce that
it was not a case of British colonialists in India merely neglecting to
guard their Indian treasures that led British colonialism to its demise.
After all, it was Britain, with the assistance of the Mughal Emperor at
the time, that established certain official civic and political
positions in Bengal, such as /diwani/, for protecting colonial monetary
interests.

Hence, nonwestern Indian nationalist discourse was a conversation that
was not easily understood by Western European colonial minds. Although
British colonialists had managed to establish full hegemonic control
over most all indigenous Indian public space (such as India's political
administration and economy), Britain was neither able to colonize
India's nonwestern social-spiritual sphere nor understand it. It was
within this unconquerable Indian social sphere that an anti-colonial,
nonwestern Indian liberation discourse was able to freely emerge and
subvert British colonialism. To successfully accomplish the ethnocentric
task of both civilizing and converting members of India's various
indigenous, culturally conceived communities to Western theology and
Christian values, Britain employed many missionaries. These missionaries
continually assaulted the cultural integrity and honor of India's
private and public-social spheres. To the growing populous of
marginalized indigenous Indians, especially those from the lower social
classes who had gained nothing by British colonialism, such cultural
colonial insults served only to increasingly alienate them from the West.

By the mid- to late 19^th century, Britain's central power consolidation
over India had already lost much of its 18^th century hold over India's
political, economic, ideological, and military domains. This was due to
many emerging political power struggles. These struggles and their
shifts indicated the social turmoil increasingly erupting amid almost
every social and cultural group within India's geo-political borders.
Chatterjee refers to this changing Indian sociological atmosphere as
India's:

    "'Passive revolution' [in which] the historical shifts in the
    strategic relations of forces between capital, precapitalist,
    dominant groups, and the popular masses, can be seen as a series of
    contingent, conjectural moments . . . New forms of dominance of
    capital become understandable, not as the immanent suppression of
    earlier contradictions, but as parts of a constructed hegemony,
    effective because of the successful exercise of both coercive and
    persuasive power . . . In the Indian case, we can look upon 'passive
    revolution' as a process involving a political-ideological program
    by which the largest possible nationalist alliance is built up
    against the colonial power. The aim is to form a politically
    independent nation-state. The means involve a series of
    alliances?within the organizational structure of the national
    movement, between the bourgeoisie, and other dominant classes?and
    the mobilization of this leadership?of mass support 'from the
    subordinate classes.'" ^33 <#note33>

Hostilities increasingly erupted between the East Indian Trading
Company's appointed colonial provincial magnates and members of India's
displaced Mughal and Vijayanagaran aristocracy who ruled before them.
Clashes between those who ruled and those they ruled occurred more
regularly within all of India's social and discontent expanded
throughout India. In addition, the British colonial expansionist
invasion of India's divergent and distinctly defined, culturally
conceived imagined communities became increasingly met with resentment,
resistance, and revolt.

Analyzing British colonization of India reveals the exact manner in
which Britain officially and systematically set in place a
self-perpetuating, formal system of dominance, subjugation, and power
consolidation. British colonialism was specifically established in India
for the purpose of dividing in order to conquer and then exploit and/or
obliterate India's co-existing indigenous cultural communities and their
constituents. Developing such an extremely elaborate and official
colonial system of dominance and subjugation required British
colonialists to first contrive a manner in which they could consolidate
and concentrate power for their own profit. Specifically, British
colonialists wanted to place the sources of India's social power in the
hands of the colonial few in lieu leaving it in the hands of India's
many indigenous, culturally conceived imagined communities. Michael Mann
states:

    "In its most general sense, power is the ability to pursue and
    attain goals through mastery of one's environment. Social power
    carries two more specific senses. The first restricts its meaning to
    mastery exercised over other people . . . Power is the probability
    that one actor within a social relationship will be in a position to
    carry out his own will despite resistance." ^34 <#note34>

Mann continues:

    "In most social relations both aspects of power, distributive and
    collective, exploitative and functional, operate simultaneously and
    are intertwined. Indeed, in pursuit of their goals, humans enter
    into cooperative, collective power relations with one another. But
    in implementing collective goals, social organizations and a
    division of labor are set up. Organization and division of functions
    carry an inherent tendency to distributive power, deriving from
    supervision and coordination. For the division of labor is
    deceptive: Although it involves specialization, of function at all
    levels, the top overlooks the whole." ^35 <#note35>

Hence British colonial elites contrived ways in which they could
permanently consolidate power among themselves by establishing a
collaborative intercolonial discourse with Indian indigenous elite
(religious leaders, property owners, traders, and other community
leaders). Intercolonial discourses occurred in numerous sociopolitical
dimensions for more than one agenda. India's nonwestern nationalist
intercolonial discourses, whether Eastern or Western in origin, started
as an ideological response to British penetration of India and attempts
to dominate India's indigenous society. Moreover, there was always more
than one strand of intercolonial and anti-colonial discourse occurring
simultaneously within any one or more of India's variant
multidimensional social structures.

British colonial discourse was constructed specifically to consolidate
and control India's land, labor, and natural resources for profit. In
order for British colonialists to accomplish this task, they had to
first establish a collaborative intercolonial discourse/ /between
themselves and Indian indigenous elites who, at that time, held India's
power themselves. Therefore, British colonialists needed to offer Indian
indigenous ruling elites a new, unprecedented reward for partaking in
collaborative intercolonial discourse. Rewarding India's indigenous
elites for willingly selling-out their own kinship clans and communities
was a seemingly simplistic task. Such a task entailed merely offering to
Indian indigenous rulers the unique opportunity to engage in humankind's
never-ending struggle to acquire the most glory, wealth, and power
relative to others. Thomas Hobbes wrote in Leviathan:

    "It is true that certain living creatures, as bees and ants, live
    sociably one with another, which are therefore by Aristotle,
    numbered amongst the political creatures . . . whereby one of them
    can signify to another what he thinks expedient for the common
    benefit. And therefore some man may perhaps desire to know why
    mankind cannot do the same. To what I answer: First, that men are
    continually in competition for honor and dignity, which these
    creatures are not; and consequently, amongst men, there ariseth on
    that ground, envy and hatred, and finally war; but amongst these
    [ants and bees] not so. Second, that amongst these creatures, the
    common good differeth not from the private [goals of the individual]
    . . . But man, whose joy consisteth in comparing himself to other
    man, can relish in nothing but what is eminent . . . " ^36 <#note36>

Hobbesian philosophy seemed to have been on target, since offering
Indian indigenous leaders the reward and opportunity to engage in
turncoat behavior toward their own people managed indeed to establish
collaborative efforts with British colonialists. This collaboration
between Indian leaders and British colonialists worked well as a central
component upon which Britain's entire colonial plan was constructed.

These British intercolonial collaborative discourses with Indian natives
were centered on multidimensional ideological issues, many of which were
previously discussed. Debates about such issues became the central stage
upon which different colonial actors and collaborators would enter to
engage in reform discourses. Both sad and ironic was the fact that,
although most reform matters dealt with women's human and civil rights,
Indian nationalists and British colonialists were never truly concerned
about reforming such. With respect to women's rights in India, women
were neither the subject nor the object of such debate. They were merely
the grounds for engaging in these collaborative intercolonial discourses.

Intercolonial discourse centering on issues of women's rights and reform
was, at times, explored from both a Western and Eastern stance. These
discussions, thus, became the avenue for which competing political
interest blocs would spy on one another and establish various contacts
for forwarding their own political agendas in India. Establishing these
intercolonial discourses was therefore central to both Indian
nationalists and British colonialists, since it offered avenues for them
both to establish and expand their power domains and social
collaborative networks. Therefore, it is not surprising that many Indian
theological pundits of Hinduism predominantly engaged in these
discourses, since the debates of reform heavily revolved around Indian
theological issues and Western secularizing thereof. This debate
continues today between India and the Western powers and also afforded
Indians (Muslim and Hindu) previously unprecedented opportunities for
establishing their own controlling power over rival social communities.

Opportunistic Indian elites collaborated with British colonialists who,
thereafter, assisted them in exploiting and subjugating their own
cultural clans and communities. Collaborative discourses between
colonialists and Indian native rulers also became a popular scheme for
the purpose of destroying so-called "dangerous classes" and those
communities and individuals vehemently opposed to British colonialism,
European principles, and exploiting India. The method worked best to
forward British colonialism in India by giving it a path of penetration
into the social space of the exact indigenous Indian communities they
desired to conquer and destroy without having to resort to using massive
military force (dominance without hegemony based upon a discourse).

Psychologically speaking, it can be said that establishing such a
discourse was successful primarily because it filled the void many
Indian elite had in desiring to maintain their previously held power.
Upon the arrival of British colonialism, these Indian leaders decided,
at least temporarily, it was better to share their power than loose it
entirely. This was until mid-19^th century when the fore of the Indian
National Liberation Movement and its nonwestern anti-colonial discourse
really got underway.

A second requirement for Britain establishing formal systems of
hegemonic control over India's numerously diverse indigenous imagined
communities consisted of establishing an official colonial policy based
on coercive, state-controlled assimilation. Such policies required that
India's imagined communities merge themselves into one state identity.
Such forced assimilation was the means by which colonial power was
further centralized and consolidated in the hands of both the
colonialists and their indigenous Indian collaborators.

From the early to mid-19^th century, collaboration existed between the
British colonialists and Indian elite. However, it later became apparent
that Indian collaborators not only wanted more equality and power than
that held by their British counterparts, but they also wanted equal
access to the most powerful political positions in India's colonial
government.

By the mid-19^th century, an anti-colonial Indian national liberation
movement in India began its subversion of British colonial rule.
Furthermore, Indian's indigenous leaders and former British
collaborators began severing themselves from their former love affair
with selfish British colonialists who were unwilling to share their
power. Indian nationalists then began consolidating political power and
wealth in India, leading India into additional power struggles.

Hence, the alliance between British colonialists and their Indian
counterparts was short lived. The British colonialists had no intention
of either relinquishing or conceding their power to Indians.

Eventually, the points of intersecting contentions between British
colonialists and Indian nationalists became inevitable and, in 1947,
culminated in India's liberation and partition. What is interesting to
notice is that the British colonialists, blinded by their lust for power
in establishing their colonial control in India, had not conceived that
their collaboration with Indian indigenous sectors would lead to
colonialism's demise. Perhaps there is wisdom in the saying that it is
best to keep one's friends close but ones enemies closer. Further
examination of the alienation, unnatural relationship, and collaboration
between British colonialists and Indian elites vindicates this verity
when examining colonial institutional practices such as:

   1. Establishing debased institutions constructed on a Western
      bourgeoisie philosophical slant.
   2. Practicing illegitimate forms of judicial colonial social
      injustice for the majority of indigenous Indians.

Practicing social injustice against native Indians and peasants in the
colonial court of law was an everyday affair during British colonialism
of India. Later, the post-colonial Indian state began employing
oppressive forms of domination and subjugation upon their own population
identical to those the British colonialists had for controlling and
exploiting members of India's lower classes.

Some scholars of nationalism argue that the same Indian nationalists who
once proclaimed the great importance of preserving and revitalizing
India's cultural integrity and its associated theological customs were
not concerned about saving Indian culture at all. They argue strongly
that many Indian nationalists were concerned instead with overthrowing
British colonialists to take control of India's secular political and
economic domains themselves. Notwithstanding, the secular contentions
between Hindus and Muslims during the disintegration of British
colonialism in India cannot but make one wonder what the real agenda of
many Indian nationalists was. Indian politicians today continue to
proclaim India to be a Western-styled democratic state, but is it really
in its practices of objective political and human rights realities?

British colonialism forever altered Indian traditional society by
transforming it into a Western-orientated, free-market led economy.
Michelle Maskiell states:

    "Changing economic conditions during the Raj, however, led to
    concomitant transformations in women's and men's work, alterations
    that were molded by colonial discourses as much as described by
    them. New technologies for agricultural processing, such as flour
    grinding, rice husking, and oil pressing, created substantial change
    in the gendering of work. Poorer women lost their jobs when
    mechanical grain processing was introduced and employment in these
    new factories went almost exclusively to men." ^37 <#note37>

In sum, India's post-colonial political establishment actually
re-established much of the revolving door dominance and subjugation
policies of the British in India. Competition over basic living
necessities further pit one imagined community against another within
India itself; eventually these communities became blinded by their lust
for power and greed, similar to the British colonialists. In the
confusion and competition for basic human necessities, the people began
loosing their sense of humanity in daily struggles for survival. The
social pressures to conform to either the Hindu or Muslim political
and/or social groupings within India became too great for most to
withstand and neighbors pillaged and murdered one another. ^38 <#note38>
India's new political elite also became incapable of getting along. This
eventually led to India's partition in 1947.

VI. Conclusion

What are the most important lessons learned from India's experience with
nationalism and colonialism? What can the Western and Eastern powers
learn from their intercultural engagements? Insofar as the British,
Western-minded imperialists are concerned, their failure in India,
hopefully, taught them the importance of respecting and comprehending
the social dynamic machinery of nonwestern Indian culture. This was
evidently very foreign to their Western European minds. British
ethnocentricity eventually led British colonial rule to an untimely demise.

In retrospect, British colonial rule in India and nonwestern Indian
nationalism each failed to establish "good government." Britain and
Indian nationalists, each fueled by their own nationalism, tried
reproducing the Western model of secular democratic governance in India.
Another lesson learned by the Indian/British experience is theology,
although it is separated from state relations and policies in the West,
should not have to be separated from state policies made in
nonwestern-governed states. Not doing so only served to oppress women
and the poverty stricken social classes in Indian society. Doing so will
help foster true democracy in India not impede it as many Western
scholars believe.

The Western secularized governmental model is not and should not be the
only acceptable form of internationally recognized government for
non-liberal states to ascribe to when seeking to obtain international
acceptance. This has always been a paradoxical problem for relations
between Western and nonwestern states such as India. Britain and Indian
society greatly differ and so will their ideas for formulating a
national state identity. The creative needs and ways in which India's
diversified imagined cultural communities conceive of their ideal
community and good government should be respected.

Britain imagined the colonial state of India as one multicultural
national identity and ideologies of citizenship the way they are
conceived of in the West. However, this was hardly the case. Therefore,
there arose a "clash of civilizations" inside India's geo-political
borders and social cavities owing to the bipolar ways in which Western,
state-centered theory engaged with nonwestern Indian nationalists
concepts of good governance and national citizenship.

Before British hegemony in India, regardless of one's primordial clan,
one could still maintain multiple loyalties. One could remain a member
of the Hindu community, yet still be a member of the international
trading community in Bombay. Thus, members of different imagined
communities could hold multiple high-status positions within their own
community while still maintaining other positions as businesspersons
and/or religious leaders. Members of divergent communities did not have
their basic human rights violated by other different imagined
communities to the extent they did after British colonialism and its
later subversion by Indian nationalism. Thus, to a large degree, it was
irrelevant whether one was Hindu or Muslim because one could
simultaneously remain loyal to a communal clan and other necessary
imagined Indian social communities.

However, after the British appeared in India, members of one tribal
community and/or different imagined cultural communities within India
had to chose between loyalties (either to the British Crown or to their
own particular culturally imagined community). A Muslim could no longer
trade with Hindus in the mid-1900s due to religious discrimination.
Moreover, both Hindus and Muslims had to become loyal to the British
Crown and work in its Civil Service to rise within the ranks of its
Western, ethnocentric hierarchy. In other words, people, regardless of
their ethnic background, could no longer maintain multicommunity
membership status in India.

Thus British colonialism created a new in India. This resulting required
"choosing of loyalties" caused social conflict and hostilities leading
to India's partition and genocidal war.

Thus the high-minded political ideas espoused in the West regarding the
great urgency of constructing a single, unified, national state identity
from so many imagined communities is more the building a utopian pipe
dream than a strategic reality to chase after. In objective procedural
practice, although political liberalism and secularism in democratic
government makes the claim it is "neutral" and indifferent in its
support of one imagined community construct of "the good life" over
another, this is not necessarily the case. Nonwestern states should not
be presumed by Western powers as capable of undertaking a quick
political transition from being a theologically based government with
social communal values to a secular democratic one without cultural
contentions occurring. Such "shock therapy" does not work in
geo-political areas whose rulers and governments were not brought up on
Western political philosophical principles.

The survival of the various imagined communities nonwestern governed
states can be destroyed by promoting the wrong types of capitalist
development projects. This can lead to additional power struggles
between minority and majority cultures until, eventually, one of the
many cultures emerges as victor and defines a "state system" of governance.

A state's rulers and the imagined community they rule over must have
complementary goals or the state itself will fail. India's many
multipolar imagined communities and their citizenry each pursued
different ideas of what they considered to be the good life during and
after British colonialism in India. Each possessed bipolar ideas
regarding their social identities and tolerance of others.

India, as a modern state constructed on a Western-colonial model of
governance, has failed. It failed in its in ability to recapture the
seemingly peaceful coexistence in India prior to European colonialism.
India's continuing cultural theological crises and civil wars in Madras,
Kashmir, and Sri Lanka have also failed in reconciling India's
noncolonized inner spiritual domain with a secular, Western,
materialistic, external, worldly one.

This paper also analyzed the manner in which these new forms of state
hierarchy and patriarchy continue to subjugate India's social civilian
society, primarily women. New forms of dominance and subjugation in
India and elsewhere also bring with it new opportunities for
anti-colonial discourse, a discourse that can undoubtedly lead to
another partition and/or ethnic genocidal civil war.

It is my hope by elucidating the failures of India's national state
formation project, I have demonstrated the manner in which a new model
for bringing peace and tolerance can be negotiated within post-colonial
India. Such a model can be the beginning of another more productive,
nonwestern discourse within India that can bring the post-colonial
Indian state to full maturity and transforming it into a tolerant,
multicultural, integrated community.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

*Note 1:* _The Economist_ Vol. 11 (1996) pg. 93 Back <#txt1>

*Note 2:* _Foreign Affairs_ Vol. 10 (1996) pg. 79 Back <#txt2>

*Note 3:* Partha Chatterjee, / _A Nation and its Fragments.,_ /Princeton
University Press, (1993)., pp.5. Back <#txt3>

*Note 4:* Benedict Anderson, /Imagined Communities/, (1983:193). Back
<#txt4>

*Note 5:* Siba N'Zatioula Grovogui, / _Sovereigns, Quasi Sovereigns and
Africans., _ /Minneapolis, MN, University of Minnesota Press., 1996.,
pp.8-9. Back <#txt5>

*Note 6:* /Ibid./ Back <#txt6>

*Note 7:* /Ibid., /pp.70-71. Back <#txt7>

*Note 8:* Partha Chatterjee, / _A Nation and its Fragments.,_ /Princeton
University Press, (1993)., pp.6-8. Back <#txt8>

*Note 9:* Partha Chatterjee, / _A Nation and its Fragments.,_ /Princeton
University Press, (1993)., pp.122. Back <#txt9>

*Note 10:* From the book entitled, / _Recasting Women _ /(1990:241).
Indian male nationalists reinforced traditional Indian nonwestern
customary rituals upon Indian women. And in doing so, Western efforts to
reform and enhance the human rights of indigenous Indian women were
stifled and turned back as cultural practices such as /Sati /were
reestablished within nonwestern Indian nationalist discourse. Such
discourse portrayed the women being coerced into participating in /Sati/
or widow immolation, as national heroines upholding India's traditional
Hindu customary norms. These "national heroines" were both sad and,
ironically, falsely portrayed as glad and willing to give up their lives
to uphold Indian national cultural practices. Indian women were also
portrayed by Indian male nationalists as superior to Western Christian
women because, supposedly, Indian women possessed a moral and spiritual
superiority. Nonwestern Indian nationalism was both oppressive towards
women and neglected to address the substantive human rights issues
plaguing most Indian women. Instead, nonwestern Indian nationalist
discourse categorized indigenous Indian women as either friends or
enemies of the Indian national liberation movement by measuring the
degree to which they adhered to the principles and practices of Indian,
nonwestern, traditional Hindu culture and its rituals (those primarily
oppressive for women such as /Sati/). Back <#txt10>

*Note 11:* For more see book entitled, / _The Mottled Dawn_ / by Attia
Hossain (1992)., pp.140., Penguin Books, NY. Back <#txt11>

*Note 12:* For more information, please refer to Robert Latham's book
entitled, / _The Liberal Moment. _ /(1997) Columbia University Press
N.Y. Back <#txt12>

*Note 13:* Barrington Moore, / _Social Origins of Dictatorship and
Democracy., _ /(1966)Beacon Press., Boston., pp.310-312. Back <#txt13>

*Note 14:* Cited from Essay entitled, / _Nationalisms in Modern World
history., _ /India's Mughal Empire was primarily 'Muslim' and had
existed in Northern India whereas the Vijayanagara Empire was primarily
premised upon 'Hinduism' and/or similarly related religious sects and
was established in the Southern part of India. Back <#txt14>

*Note 15:* Cited from Chatterjee's essay in / _Recasting Women_ /
entitled, / _The Nationalist Resolution of the Women's Question _
/(1990), Rutgers University Press NJ., pp. 238-239. Back <#txt15>

*Note 16:* Cited from Chatterjee's Essay in / _Recasting Women_ /
entitled, / _The Nationalist Resolution of the Women's Question _
/(1990), Rutgers University Press NJ, pp.238-239. Back <#txt16>

*Note 17:* Partha Chatterjee, / _A Nation and its Fragments.,_
/Princeton University Press, (1993)., pp.6-8. Back <#txt17>

*Note 18:* As in most colonial imperial conquests of the British, they
were never merely satisfied with exploiting the people and lands they
had unjustly conquered. British colonialism tended to also include
explicit attempts to "civilize the natives." Both sad and ironic is that
Britain today still has yet to fully comprehend the reasons for which
its colonial conquest of India was met with such resistance and later
subverted by nonwestern Indian nationalists. British colonialism met its
demise by failing to sustain control over the Indian population and its
territorial lands due to Britain's refusal to allow the natives they
colonized to continue unhindered in their daily traditional customary
cultural practices. The British, rather, continued to denigrate and
intrude, while also trying to convert Indians to Christianity. They
tried to turn them away from their own distinct nonwestern cultural
principles and practices associated with their indigenous cultural and
theological rituals by portraying them as brutal beasts. The more the
British attempted to reform nonwestern Indian practices, such as /Sati/,
/purdah/, child marriage, divorce, remarriage, infanticide, and women's
rights associated with India's inner private domain, the stronger Indian
nationalist impetus was in its resistance to this colonial domination
and subjugation. Thus it is illumined that nonwestern Indian
anti-colonial national liberation discourse as a response to British
colonialism was successful by gaining Indian independence from British
rule (1947). However, scholars should question whether nonwestern
anti-colonial Indian nationalist discourse would have emerged to the
extent it did if the British had not insisted, to the extent they did,
to conquer and colonialize India's private spiritual and familial domain
rather than only India's materialistic and public worldly domain. Back
<#txt18>

*Note 19:* Cited from Chatterjee's Essay in / _Recasting Women_ /
entitled, / _The Nationalist Resolution of the Women's Question _
/(1990), Rutgers University Press NJ., pp. 238-239. Back <#txt19>

*Note 20:*. Partha Chatterjee, /The Nation and its Fragments., /(1993)
Princeton University Press., NJ., pp.88. Back <#txt20>

*Note 21:* Partha Chatterjee, /The Nation and its Fragments., /(1993)
Princeton University Press., NJ., pp.182-200. Back <#txt21>

*Note 22:* Partha Chatterjee, /The Nation and its Fragments., /(1993)
Princeton University Press., NJ., pp.40-41. Back <#txt22>

*Note 23:* Cited from Chatterjee's Essay in / _Recasting Women_ /
entitled, / _The Nationalist Resolution of the Women's Question _
/(1990), Rutgers University Press NJ., pp. 233. Back <#txt23>

*Note 24:* Cited from Sumanta Banerjee's Essay in / _Recasting Women_ /
entitled,, / _Marginalization of Women's Popular Culture in Nineteenth
Century Bengal., _ /(1990), Rutgers University Press NJ., pp. 165. Back
<#txt24>

*Note 25:* Cited from Chatterjee's Essay in / _Recasting Women_ /
entitled, / _The Nationalist Resolution of the Women's Question _
/(1990), Rutgers University Press NJ., pp. 243-244. Back <#txt25>

*Note 27:* Cited from Chatterjee's Essay in / _Recasting Women_ /
entitled, / _The Nationalist Resolution of the Women's Question _
/(1990), Rutgers University Press NJ., pp. 247. Back <#txt27>

*Note 28:* Partha Chatterjee, /The Nation and its Fragments, /(1993)
Princeton University Press., NJ., pp.38. Back <#txt28>

*Note 29:* Ibid., pp.39-40. Back <#txt29>

*Note 30:* Cited from Kumkum Shangari and Sudesh Vaid's Introduction of
book entitled, / _Recasting Women._ /, (1990), Rutgers University Press
NJ., pp. 18. Back <#txt30>

*Note 31:* Cited from Chatterjee's essay entitled, / _The Nationalist
Resolution of the Women's Question, _ /from Shangari and Vaid's book
entitled, / _Recasting Women,_ /(1990), Rutgers University Press NJ.,
pp. 247. Back <#txt31>

*Note 32:* Partha Chatterjee, /The Nation and its Fragments., /(1993)
Princeton University Press., NJ., pp.5. Back <#txt32>

*Note 33:* Partha Chatterjee, /The Nation and its Fragments., /(1993)
Princeton University Press., NJ., pp.212. Back <#txt33>

*Note 34:* Michael Mann, / _The Sources of Social Power., _ / _
_Cambridge University Press Vol I., (1986)., pp.6. Back <#txt34>

*Note 35:* /Ibid/.7-10. Back <#txt35>

*Note 36:* Cited from John Sommerville and Ronald Santoni's, / _Social
and Political Philosophy., _ /Anchor Books., (1963) pp.150. Back <#txt36>

*Note 37:* Essay written by Michelle Maskiell entitled., / _Embrodering
the past: Phulari textiles and gendered work as "tradition" and
"heritage" in colonial and contemporary Punjab, _ /printed in the /
_Journal of Asian Studies, _ /(May 1999), pp.2-4 of 20. Back <#txt37>

*Note 38:* To better understand the intense emotional pressures that
caused Indian communities to completely loose their sense of humanity,
refer to the book entitled, / _A Mottled Dawn (Fifty Sketches and
Stories of Partition)_ / by Saadat Hasan Manto, (1997) Penguin Books.
Back <#txt38>

------------------------------------------------------------------------

*Note ^* :*Jill Starr is a graduate student at Montclair State
University in New Jersey. She currently studies Preventing International
War Crimes at New York University, Division of Continuing Education,
with Former Nuremberg Prosecutor Benjamin Ferencz. Her major
concentrations are Human Rights and how diplomacy can be enhanced
between the United States and Yugoslavia. She also specializes in
enhancing cultural and theological understandings between the United
States and Yugoslavia. Back <#txt*>



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