Daniel Corkery's Cultural Criticism: Selected Writings

What is a Nation?

he understood Ireland, I should say, much better than my Cambridge student of thirty and more years ago. I did not ask him whether he had forgotten the songs of his own people. I should hazard he had not. he took pride in telling me that in fifteen years hindustani was to be the official language of India – ‘official’ was the word he used. It is a more useful word in this case than national. For national is a word of no precise meaning. the NeW aGe Now, what has brought it into my mind to write all this was an announcement I had listened to, that a new state was to be set up in India – in fact, several new states – and their limits were to be fixed according to the language spoken in the area. a start was to be made with the speakers of Urdu – a language with a literary history of five or six centuries. The announcement spoke of these new states as linguistic states. truly a new day is dawning on the world. even in little things one may notice it. Fifty years ago no young Indian working in an english factory would have bothered his head to pick up fragments of any language outside english: it was not done. Nor would any young Irish speaker working in the same factory have dared to utter a word of his own people’s language. That certainly was not done. Little things these. But that notion of Linguistic States is no little thing. It is little less than a challenge to that devastating uniformity which mankind’s conquest of physical forces is threatening the world with. GOD SpeeD the tONGUe! * * * What is a Nation?1 Dipping into an Indian book, Daniel Corkery asks – What is a Nation? Lately I described how a law student from Cambridge, an Indian, on entering my room, immediately took up a book and from it read a passage aloud.2 That book was Macaulay’s Reviews and Essays – a book calculated to Part Three. The Nation and the State 173 give an elocutionist every chance.3 In my mind, however, that student connects himself more closely with another book – Nationalism, by Sir rabindranath tagore. For, before he left me that evening, I had got him to write his name on a flyleaf in it. I am now looking at it. he added his address. It was: National Liberal Club, Victoria Street, London, S.W. That book appeared in 1917, as my older readers may remember. They will certainly remember that its author, who had received the Nobel prize in 1913, threw back his title at england after Dyer’s slaughter of hundreds of unarmed Indians at amritzar in 1919.4 Such a man should, one thinks, be able to discuss Nationalism. What he discusses under that name is, however, only that bugbear imperialists parade throughout the whole world to blind the world from peering too insistently at their own doctrine and its effects, that is, at Imperialism. On page nine he writes: ‘a nation, in the sense of the political and economic union of a people, is that aspect which a whole population assumes when organised for a mechanical purpose.’5 ‘political and economic union,’ ‘Organised for a mechanical purpose’ – what has a nation as such to do with such labels? Surely what they attach themselves to is not the nation but the state. It was as a protest against such false conceptions as these terms indicate that pearse used, if he did not invent, the descriptive phrase – ‘the spiritual nation.’6 It was a useful phrase. It is still useful. But a nation does not need to be described as spiritual for it is never anything else. One might as well use such phrases as ‘a human man,’‘a spiritual man.’ The state’s business is, in part, to act and think politically, as also economically, and to organise mechanically when necessary – always acting and thinking for its own safety and improvement.The nation knows no such business. The Indian poet again, on page 110, asks: ‘What is the Nation?’ and answers: ‘It is the aspect of a whole people as an organised power.’7 and almost immediately he tells us what a price it pays for being such. ‘But this strenuous effort after strength and efficiency drains man’s energy from his higher nature, where he is self-sacrificing and creative.’8 In saying this...