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Chapter 5 Somatic Nationalism Gama the Great, Another Heroic Indian Disembodied Nationalism In his influential collection of essays entitled The Nation and Its Fragments (1993a) Partha Chatterjee argues for a treatment of nationalism that is cultural rather than political, one that is not limited by a discussion of institutional structures, policies, and government. In doing so, and in placing the culture of nationalism squarely in the imaginary ofthe colonized middle class, Chatterjee follows, but also extends, Benedict Anderson's concept of imagined communities (1991). Chatterjee poses this significant question: what is left to imagine, in terms of the meaning of community in countries such as India, if, in fact, the nation as such is defined in European terms? Chatterjee's argument is that the content and meaning of nationalism , as opposed to its formal political structures, emerged in India and elsewhere in what he calls the "inner" domain of culture. It is here, he says, that "nationalism launches its most powerful, creative and historically significant project: to fashion a 'modern' culture that is nevertheless not Western" (6). Despite being powerful, creative, and historically significant, however, these autonomous imaginings ofcommunity are problematically liberating, since they are engendered by colonialism. As a number of scholars have noted, this "post-colonial predicament" is the legacy of Orientalism (Breckenridge and van der Veer 1993). As Chatterjee points out, by making a distinction between cultural 114 Nationalism and the Embodied Self forms and political structures, the modern, non-Western nation is often "overwhelmed and swamped by the history of the post colonial state" (1993a:11). What he means by this is that the modern state apparatus fragments the imagined community, and that a concept of the nation preempts, in some sense, alternative conceptions of modern society. My own interest in nationalism, body discipline, and the emergence therein of the subjective self leads me to examine the way in which bodies, bodybuilding, and concepts of strength came into play in the fragmenting, imagined community of colonial and postcolonial India. More specifically, in this chapter I reflect on the nature of heroism in the context of nationalism and decolonization , for although the hero is certainly not a figure unique to the imperial age-and is, in fact, more at home in the archaic light of civilization than in the dark age of conquest-there is a sense in which modern heroics can reveal an overwhelming tragedy that is at the heart of nationalism. Although Chatterjee has aptly defined the derivative nature of the tragic discourse on nationalism and others, such as Ashis Nandy (1995), have provided vivid portraits of those engaged in the practice of imagining alternative modernities, one can, while enmeshed in the small world of middle-class culture, all too easily escape the postcolonial predicament, and heal its mortal wounds-or, as van der Veer acknowledges in his study of religious nationalism, all too easily slip into the comfortable old shoes of an earlier historiography and anthropology and "reify one's object of discussion " (1994:ixv)-and thereby simply rationalize things in terms of a logic where "inner" culture is somehow insulated from other spheres of public life and lost selves are more or less recovered when they are, or can be, neatly partitioned. Both Nandy and Chatterjee are exceptional in their ability to avoid the pitfalls of reification. And they realize, of course, that such foundational concepts as "culture" and the "self" are products of an Orientalist discourse (Chatterjee 1993a; Nandy 1995). Moreover, some of the best work in recent years has demonstrated, through direct or indirect dialogue with Nandy and Chatterjee, how culture and colonialism are mutually constituted. As Nicholas Dirks has put it, much of this work shows how "colonialism is what culture is all about" (1992:11; see also Prakash 1995; van derVeer Gama the Great 11 5 1994). The problem, however, is that it is hard work to write what Prakash, building on the work of Chatterjee, Nandy, and the Subaltern Studies collective, refers to as postfoundational histories (Prakash 1992:371-83). It is difficult largely because all apparently stable points of reference- the traditional framing devices of class, religion, caste, and so forth-are consciously destabilized, and it is difficult to maintain a consistently dis-Oriented perspective that is, nevertheless, clearly focused on critical issues of power and representation . Therefore I would agree with Prakash in seeing Nandy's work as one of the best examples of how a proactive "mythography " of the present should be done, in order...

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