Review

Reviewed Work(s): Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse by
Partha Chatterjee
Review by: Curtis C. Smith
Source: Utopian Studies, Vol. 5, No. 1 (1994), pp. 161-163
Published by: Penn State University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20719263
Accessed: 23-11-2016 04:39 UTC
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Book Reviews 161

airport, the bus stops, and the remains of a shopping mall (whose boutique alone had
taken in $75,000 a day during festivals!) as well as large buildings that had served as
dwelling places, visitor center, city hall, hotel, university, publishing house, media
center, power station, communal shower, vehicle maintenance center, cafeterias, and
the now-skeletal two-acre meditation center that had accommodated Bhagwan and
15,000 followers during festivals.
Like many of my communal-studies colleagues, I felt a mixture of fascination
and horror that so much had been created and destroyed so quickly. A year later, I
began Charisma and Control in Rajneeshpuram with great hopes that I might gain
insight into what had happened. What I got was a lot of information, but not much

insight. Who were these Rajneesh enthusiasts who are now dispersed around the
globe as "a loose assemblage of centers, communes, and networks" (127)? What will
become of them without their leader, who died in India as the book was going to
press? What does the rise and fall of Rajneeshpuram signify for our culture or our
times? $50 will get you the book, but it won't give you the answers.

Michael S. Cummings
University of Colorado, Denver

Partha Chatterjee. Nationalist Thought and

the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse.
Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993. viii + 181 pp. $16.95.
Partha Chatterjee announces in this book the very broad scope of (1) tracing the
historical evolution of nationalist thought in the colonial world; (2) establishing a
relationship between such thought and Utopian thought; and (3) in a postmodern
vein, challenging the validity of any such thinking and of the "cunning of reason"
itself. While what he actually discusses is considerably less sweeping than the above
would imply, this is an ambitious work.
Chatterjee begins by acknowledging the contradictions of nationalism as an
ideology in a colonial society seeking to free itself, for "nationalism sets out to assert
its freedom from European domination. But in the very conception of its project, it
remains a prisoner of the prevalent European intellectual fashions" (10). To put this

another way: "Why is it that non-European colonial countries have no historical

alternative but to try to approximate the given attributes of modernity when that very

process of approximation means their continued subjection under a world order

which only sets their tasks for them and over which they have no control?" (10)
Chatterjee's answer is that the lack of an alternative is inherent in the hegemony

of western rationalism, which imposes itself on all cultures even though anthro
pology has shown that it is problematical at best to establish cross-cultural common
alities. In short, colonial nationalist thinkers have had no more choice than Marx,
operating within a system the validity of which they challenge.
How can colonial thinkers move beyond western hegemony and into the kind of
thinking which can help to liberate colonial people? In his most theoretical chapter,
Chatterjee speaks of the play between "thematic" and "problematic" in nationalist
thought?a play which offers a way out. The "thematic" content of western concepts
of the Orient is essentialist and unchanging, based on "the distinction between 'the

East' and 'the West'" (38), but the "problematic" aspect refers to changing condi
tions and, within them, new political and new nationalist theories to describe them.
In short, the dynamic of history produces change:

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162 UTOPIAN STUDIES

Taken together, in its dialectical unity, the problematic and the thematic will

enable us to show how nationalism succeeds in producing a different dis

course .... Its problematic forces it relentlessly to demarcate itself from the
discourse of colonialism. Thus nationalist thinking is necessarily a struggle
with the entire body of systemic knowledge, a struggle that is political at the

same time as it is intellectual....

Yet. . . nationalist thought cannot remain only as a negation; it is also a

positive discourse which seeks to replace the structure of colonial power with a
new order, that of national power. Can nationalist thought produce a discourse
of order while daring to negate the very foundations of a system of knowledge
which has conquered the world? How far can it succeed in maintaining its dif
ference from a discourse that seeks to dominate it? (42)

Chatterjee's questions remain real for him and for the reader as he constructs a
theory of three stages of colonial nationalist thought:

1) The moment of departure, in which colonial nationalists accept the "the

matic" of western thinking?the essentialist differences between West and East?
and can assert independence only in a cultural sense by suggesting that the East is
morally and culturally superior.
2) The moment of maneuver, which asserts nationalism "by decrying the mod
ern" (51). The illustration is Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi.
3) The moment of arrival, an antithetical affirmation of the modem and power
ful nation state, illustrated by Jawaharlal Nehru's works.
Chatterjee's illustration of stage one in the works of Bankimchandra Chattopad

hyay (1939-94) is of relatively little interest, since the reader has already been pre

pared for the limitations of nascent nationalism. However, the comparison and
contrast between the thought of Gandhi and Nehru is at the crux of the book.

Chatterjee stresses Gandhi's challenge to the validity of civil society. Gandhi

believes that "the legal fiction of equality before the law and the supposed neutrality
of state institutions only have the effect of perpetuating the inequalities and divisions
which already exist in society" (91). The wealth produced by modem society is evil
rather than good, and all industrialism, no matter how socialized, is evil (88). Gandhi's

alternative is consensus democracy: "the Utopia is ... a patriarchy in which the

ruler, by his moral quality and habitual adherence to truth, always expresses the col

lective will" (92).

Chatterjee acknowledges and indeed underscores the paradoxes of Gandhi's

positions. Believing in universal truth and denying any direction to history, Gandhi
is from a Leninist perspective a romantic reactionary (98); but by creating a mass
movement of the peasantry and thus "an ideological basis for including the whole
people within the political nation" (110), Gandhi opened up a new problematic and
new historical possibilities for the Indian state (100).
It was for this reason that Nehru embraced Gandhi's movement, although he

also negated Gandhi's premises. Nehru supported Gandhi's mass campaigns and
agreed with "the association of social and economic questions with the demands of
nationalism" (131). But although Gandhi's Utopia is outside of civil society and the
state, to Nehru: "Social justice for all cannot be provided within the old framework
because it is antiquated, decadent, and incapable of dynamism.... It is not possible
to undertake an effective reorganization of the economic structures of society if the
state does not assume a central coordinating and directing role" (133). For Nehru,
then, the state is the source of national regeneration, and indeed: 'This now became
the new Utopia, a realist's Utopia, a Utopia here and now. It was a Utopia supremely

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Book Reviews 163

statist, where the function of government was wholly abstracted out of the messy
business of politics and established in its pristine purity as rational decision mak

ing. .." (160).

Chatterjee is clearly sympathetic to Nehru's position, but his tone implies skepti
cism as well. In his concluding chapter, in fact, Chatterjee makes it clear that rational

decision making?indeed, Reason itself?is identified with capital during the pres
ent historical stage. Is Nehru's arrival at the strong, rational state really distinct from

Fabian socialism?

Chatterjee's valuable book, it should be added, makes reference almost exclu

sively to Indian nationalist thinkers. Would Chatterjee be willing to extend his his
torical stages to, say, China, with Mao Zedong at the moment of manoeuver, perhaps,

and Deng Xiaoping at the moment of arrival? And where would he place such a
thinker as Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana? Perhaps, too, it would be unfair to ask about
the legacy of Gandhi's and Nehru's thought to the India of today. But it would be
fair to suggest that a more accurate title to Chatterjee's book would be Nationalist

Thought and India.

Curtis C. Smith
State University of New York at Cobleskill

George D. Chryssides. The Advent of Sun Myung Moon:

The Origins, Beliefs and Practices of the Unification Church
London: Macmillan, 1991. xii + 230 pp. $14.99.

In his Tractatus theologico-politicus, the 17th century Jewish philosopher,

Baruch Spinoza, wrote that "I have labored carefully, when faced with human
actions, not to mock, not to lament, not to execrate, but to understand." George D.
Chryssides rigorously adheres to Spinoza's stance toward inquiry in his treatment of
the Rev. Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church, or to give it its pejorative name,

the "Moonies." (The church's official name is the Holy Spirit Association for the
Unification of World Christianity, or in Korean, Tongil-kyo.) Employing a phe
nomenological and historical approach, Chryssides attempts to answer the following
questions about the origins, beliefs, and practices of the Unification Church: Who
founded it and why? What does it teach? How did its teachings arise? In ritual and
lifestyle, how do its members put its teachings into practice? Chryssides aimed for
objectivity in his study, the result being that the thirty-year old church has received
its most fair investigation to date, even though what he wrote displeased its members

in England because they thought he had characterized the church as syncretistic,

overemphasized its sexual aspects, and divulged too much about one of its liturgical

ceremonies.

Chryssides took on a difficult project because most people think that the Unifi
cation Church is either bizarre, immoral, superstitious, or all of the above, and for
valid reasons. What image does the Unification Church project? Korean mainline
churches regard Moon's new religious movement as one more among its many rene
gade sects, a sa-kyo, a pseudo-religion. All mainline churches charge the Unification
Church with heresy on two counts: that its main book, Divine Principle, extends the
Christian scriptural canon, and that it teaches that Jesus Christ was not truly God,
but only a man. In times past, the church's proselytizers used harassing tactics par
ticularly aimed at the unsuspecting and naive. During the 1970s, Doberman pinschers
frequently greeted visitors at the gate of Unification compounds. The harassment has

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