By: Partha Chatterjee [Professor Emeritus of Anthropology and of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies, Columbia University] Published in: *Scroll* Date: July 29, 2025 Source: https://scroll.in/article/1084837/literature-icons-history-how-indian-nationhood-was-built-through-local-languages
An excerpt from ‘*For a Just Republic: The People of India and the State*’, by Partha Chatterjee. "The consciousness of large democratic solidarities was grounded in the regional languages. This was the reason why the Congress, at the moment of its transformation into a mass movement of nationalism, realised the importance of organising itself into monolingual provincial organisations. The same force was active after Independence in the demand for linguistic states. But if the proximate community of national solidarity was built around the regional languages, how could there be a sense of Indian nationhood?" "This is where the Indian experience has produced a unique historical example. This book will set out the argument that the description of the Indian nation varies according to the language formation in which one is positioned. The nation is imagined and contested in different ways in Tamil, Marathi, Urdu, Hindi, Punjabi, Assamese, or Bengali, and different genres of prose and verse literature, music, art, and theatre participate in this project of imagination. But even when the entity may be called the Indian nation, it actually looks different from each regional perspective. This is reflected in the fact that the terms 'nation' and 'state' often have different equivalents in the regional languages. Thus, Assamese and Odia use *desh*, and Telugu and Tamil *desam* and *tecam*, to mean nation, while in Bengali the word is *jati*. The word for state in Bengali is *rashtra* and in Telugu *rashtram*, which are completely different from the way the word is used in Hindi. Tamil uses *arasu* or *maanilam*." "The history of the Indian nation as a solidarity of the people can only be imagined in a vernacular print language: of these, there are several and each produces a different description of the Indian nation. Consequently, only a relativist view can reconcile the history of the state with that of the people." *Excerpted with permission from *For a Just Republic: The People of India and the State, *Partha Chatterjee, Permanent Black and * *Ashoka University.*
