SANGHAMITRA MISRA

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The editors tell us that they have “organised the essays into three groups based not so much on the academic disciplines of the authors or the parts of India they cover, as on the types of material they deal with” (p14). The book is accordingly divided into three sections: ‘Regions in History and Literature’, ‘Regions in Imagination and Ritual’ and ‘Regions in Politics’. Apart from the problem of conceptual overlaps and the refusal of the essays to remain confined to the categories that the sections assign, there is also the more obvious problem of the use of multiple kinds of sources by several essays. More importantly, however, such an arrangement fails to emphasise adequately the essays’ complex and nuanced reading of the concept of the region, the strength of a collection such as this. I was tempted therefore, in this review, to arrange them in an alternate order from the one suggested in the volume. It is hoped that this order would succeed in highlighting conceptual linkages and shifts between the essays in their analysis of the processes through which regional categories were constructed and resisted in colonial and post-colonial India.

To begin with, the historicity of the region, both imagined and material, is a concern that is foregrounded in these studies, and following from this, the idea of a regional identity as an imagined construct, subject to moments of disintegration and accommodation and characterised by transient, shifting boundaries. In several essays, this issue converges around explaining the connections between colonialism, culture and identities. Thus, the colonial state’s normative view of colonised society, marked by a degree of coherence and articulation not seen in the pre-colonial regimes, and which saw knowledge production as primarily a disciplinary project, informs the essays on the formation of Oriya and Maharashtrian identities. Bishnu Mohapatra, in his essay on Oriya linguistic nationalism, attributes the emergence of an Oriya identity to the “fixing” of previously fluid cultural and linguistic categories. Prachi Deshpande’s essay returns to the familiar ground of history writing and regionalism to discover a more complex relationship between the discipline and the new emergent classes and communities in late 19th century Maharashtra than has been allowed for in the historiography from the region. Reflecting upon the critical significance of political power in the imagining of collective identities, the essay proposes a more layered reading of the “practices through which Maratha history was constituted as hegemony of colonial modernity, Daniel Jasper’s detailed account of the spectacle of the Shivaji festival in different parts of Maharashtra traces post-colonial continuities in the persistent evoking of history to arbitrarily validate contemporary political agendas. Colonial categories and postcolonial continuities is the subject of analysis also in Surinder Jodhka’s essay of the emergence and consolidation of social identities in contemporary Punjab. Against the essentialising the category of the region, Jodhka lays out a detailed narrative of the construction of Sikh identity, the shifts in markers from language to religion, and the contingency of the political appropriation of symbols and identities.

What emerges most powerfully in these essays is their engagement with the tensions between colonial power and the colonised, particularly with those concerning the interplay between colonial power and imperial knowledge and the contradictions of colonial cultures. It is then quite puzzling that the project of colonial (and post-colonial) governmentality, and its critical implications for the emergence of collectivities are not taken up for discussion at all in the Introduction. The diverse scholarship on colonial knowledge, cultural identities, modernity and the nation, and their central bearing on the arguments in several of the papers, is a glaring absence in the editor’s note. What we are offered by way of explanation instead is a highly problematic historical narrative of Indian nationalism that essentialises the nation, dehistoricises “modernity”, and sits the region rather awkwardly in the midst of it all. We are told, for instance, that “the modern Indian nation state was constructed on the foundations of a civilisational bond” (p10) and that in “in modern India, the idea of the region emerged during the course of the national movement” (p 9).

To return to the essays, Daniel Jasper’s rediscovery of the appropriation of the symbol of Shivaji for reinforcing the cultural and political power of the Maharashtrian people connects us to another significant focus of the anthology – the idea of the region as a category for the deployment of power. Although this is

A strand in Ramaswamy’s essay – the idea of a “lost” homeland in the Tamil devotional imagination that exceeds the territorial boundaries of the nation state – can connect us, though tangentially, to Anne Feldhaus’ description of the “religious geography” of Maharashtra and the inevitable overlap between religious spaces and administrative boundaries. For the most part though, Feldhaus sees a happy coexistence of the two kinds of spaces. Through descriptions of the numerous pilgrimages that define this sacred topography and during which regions are imagined but also de-imagined, the essay sensitises us to a defining marker of a region: its frequently contingent and transient nature.

And finally, along with the presumptions about colonial modernity and the articulation of identities, there is another strand that informs some of the essays in the collection. This is the burden of the precolonial heritage, the way it evolved and the evidence of pre-colonial continuities in colonial and contemporary histories. The obvious example is Richard Freeman’s contribution to the volume. The essay, which looks at the emergence and development of regional consciousness in premodern literary identity in medieval Kerala, traces the memory of the region to precolonial times, simultaneously drawing fine lines of difference between “regional consciousness” (a self-conscious articulation) and “regional imagination” (a largely unreflective practice). Yet again, the significance of the location of “linguisticliterary and specifically Kerala identity” in medieval and not colonial times, appears to have escaped the editors. Instead the editorial note continues to stress on the absolute modernity and the origins of regionalism, ignoring the nuanced negotiation with these issues by some essays.

On a concluding note, in a growing body of work in recent times, there has been a denial of nationalism and colonialism as important sites around which the notion of the region gets constituted, sharpened by a refusal to privilege the nation in the imagining of the region and other collectivities. The focus in these writings has been on local imaginations and spaces that are not necessarily formed in resistance to mainstream national narratives. These imaginings neither contest the nation nor do its narratives appropriate them. Rather, they are “beyond the nation”, as it were, with histories and memories that are not in a dialogical encounter of any kind with the nation. This trend, visible, for instance, in some recent work on collective memories and identities in the transitional and liminal regions in north eastern India, is not reflected in this collection.

More crucially, the anthology raises the larger question of whether the region is really only a derivative category that at times might coalesce social/cultural and political factors and help freeze history at certain moments, but is not always necessarily always a foregrounded concept. This is evident in all the essays in the collection and leaves the reader wondering why the canon of research on the region, which seems to be often another dimension to the existing corpus on political and cultural studies, should be projected as an independent area of research. As with other similar collections, the essays raise critical questions but do not explain why they should be brought under the umbrella of region studies.

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Email: sanghamitramisra@yahoo.com