| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Asia

Rajat Kanta Ray. The Felt Community: Commonalty and Mentality before the Emergence of Indian Nationalism. New York: Oxford University Press. 2003. Pp. xii, 580. Rs. 1270.00.

This monograph engages with the influential idea, articulated by a body of literature on nationalism, that concepts of "nation," "nationalism," and "nationality" were essential attributes of a modernity associated with features such as a vigorous print culture and industrialization. Rajat Kanta Ray joins other scholars who argue against the assumption of the inalienable connection between nation/nationalism and the modern age, postulated, among others, by Ernest Gellner and Benedict Anderson. By focusing specifically on the South Asian subcontinent, Ray also finds himself engaged in an explicit dialogue with historians of the late subaltern school who have characterized the modern nation in India as being of very recent vintage, one that was imported into the subcontinent through British colonial rule. Ray objects to the view that no sense of nation or nationality had existed in India prior to its experience of colonial rule during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Implicitly, he is also arguing against colonialist characterizations of premodern Indian people as mired in narrow, particularistic affiliations—such as the ties of caste, religion, or sect—and incapable of forming broader bonds of affiliation such as those embodied in the concept of the nation.

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