of the Nation Prathama Banerjee simply speaking, though his argument is anything but simplistic, Sartori argues that culture appeared, by the 19th century, as the name for productive and creative human labour that promised to free humanity from the state of nature. In that, it was indeed central to the capitalist mode Currently, historians of south Asia are struggling to liberate history from the nation. This is more than an effort to escape the thrall of nationalist history and nationalist ideology. That, indeed, was an earlier attempt. Marxist historians of the 1960s and 1970s questioned nationalism as an ideology by foregrounding the elite class character of the nation. Subaltern studies historians of the 1980s and 1990s productively
