Isas Departmental's video: Partha Chatterjee A Relativist View of the Indian Nation: Bhattacharya Lecture on Future of India

Speaker: Partha Chatterjee, Political theorist and historian Discussants: Pranab Bardhan, Professor of Graduate School at the Department of Economics, UC Berkeley Abhishek Kaicker, Associate Professor of History, UC Berkeley Sponsors: Institute for South Asia Studies, The Bhattacharya India Fund at UC Berkeley, Master of Development Practice, Department of Political Science, Department of Anthropology The Institute for South Asia Studies is proud to announce the 4th Bhattacharya Lectureship on the Future of India, a lecture series that asks leading thinkers—scholars, artists, activists, political, economic, and social leaders—to address the possibilities and challenges for India in the future. Our 4th lecture in this series will be delivered by the prominent political theorist and historian, Partha Chatterjee . _________________ Abstract Research in the last three decades on the print literatures in the various Indian languages has revealed that the consciousness of the people as constituting a nation was deeply grounded in the emergence in the 19th and 20th centuries of the regional vernaculars as standardized print languages. But the identity of the people-nation in each region had constituent features that were not the same everywhere. At the same time, the identity of a linguistic community as a people was located within a larger identity of belonging to the Indian nation. This paper argues that while there is a real construct of the Indian nation, it looks different when viewed from the perspective of each regional language. There is no language-neutral perspective available. Hence, unlike monolingual federal nations like the United States, the Indian nation must be viewed in a relativist perspective. About the Speaker Partha Chatterjee is a political theorist and historian. He studied at Presidency College in Calcutta, and received his PhD from the University of Rochester. He divides his time between Columbia University and the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, where he was the director from 1997 to 2007. He is the author of more than twenty books, monographs and edited volumes and is a founding member of the Subaltern Studies Collective. He as awarded the Fukuoka Asian Culture Prize for 2009 for outstanding achievements in the field of Asian studies. His books include: Lineages of Political Society: Studies in Postcolonial Democracy (2011), Empire and Nation: Selected Essays (2010), The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World (2006), A Princely Impostor? The Strange and Universal History of the Kumar of Bhawal (2002), A Possible India: Essays in Political Criticism (1997), The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (1994), and Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse? (1993). His recent work on global practices of empire since the eighteenth century has resulted in the book The Black Hole of Empire (2012). Chatterjee delivered the Ruth Benedict lectures in the Department of Anthropology in April 2018. The expanded version of these lectures was published by Columbia University Press in 2019 as a book entitled I am the People": Reflections on Popular Sovereignty. A larger book entitled Government by the People: Critique of the Nation Form is nearing completion. His next project will be a people's history of Bengal (including Bangladesh and West Bengal) in the twentieth century. He is also a poet, playwright, and actor. In the Mira Nair film The Namesake (2007), he played the role of “A Reformed Hindoo.” _________________ The Bhattacharya India Fund was established in Fall 2016 with a generous gift from Kimi and Shankar Bhattacharya, UC Berkeley alums and longtime supporters of Bangla Studies at Berkeley and of the ISAS. This new fund supports two critical programs, the annual Bhattacharya Lectureship on the Future of India, and the Bhattacharya Graduate Fellowship. The Lectureship asks leading thinkers—scholars, artists, activists, political, economic, and social leaders—to address the possibilities and challenges for India in the future. The competitive Fellowship enables us to support the best graduate student research in India by providing funding to UC Berkeley graduate students to undertake research travel to India (two awards of $1000 each) or domestic conference travel for presentations on topics related to contemporary India (four awards of $500 each).