Partha Chatterjee

Key ideas:
1. That the nationalist project was to fashion a "modern" national culture that is nevertheless not Western.

2. Anti-colonial nationalism created its own domain of sovereignty by dividing the spiritual (inner) realm from the material (outer) realm.

3. "The greater the success in imitating Western skills in the material domain, therefore the greater the need to preserve the distinctness of one's spiritual culture"

4.Contradiction of the colonial state - "destined never to fulfill the normalising mission of the modern state because the premise of its power was a rule of colonial difference, namely the preservation of the alienness of the ruling group."

5. Ironically, it became the historical task of nationalism, which insisted on its own marks of cultural difference with the West, to demand that there be no rule of difference in the domain of the state."

6. And the task of colonialism to deny it. Thus, the Ilbert Bill showed the inherent impossibility of completeing the project of the modern state without superseding the conditions of colonial rule, which were based on racial division.

7. Elite and Subaltern domains not only acted in opposition to eachother, but through this process of struggle, have shaped the emergent form of the other.

8. Discourse: Native history: Problem is not always one of removing history but of history removing all else: Vincent Smith: "So long as Hindus continue to be Hindus, caste cannot be destroyed or even materially modified." (17)

9. The rule of colonial difference: Part of a common strategy for the deployment of the modern forms of disciplinary power - thus, the history of the colonial state, far from being incidental, is of crucial interest to the study of the past, present and future of the modern state."

10. Does Chatterjee want to emphasise difference or identity? Unless he defines his terms of modernity, it is impossible to know if such a "different modernity" is possible.… (plus d'informations)