Nationalism criticism of Anderson's Theory By Ranajit Guha
Benedict Anderson wrote a book ‘Imagined Communities’. He said that a nation is an imagined community. He gave theories about the emergence of Nationalism. In this short summary, I will talk about how Ranajit Guha criticized the theory of Benedict Anderson's theory of nationalism. Benedict Anderson talked about two models in Official nationalism. One is the European model and another one this British model. Here, Ranajit Guha criticized about his models in creating nationalism. He discriminated Anderson’s work and point out where his theory is lacking knowledge. He mentioned why his work is Eurocentric.
Criticism of nationalism
Ranajit Guha's first criticism was that the writings he wrote were filled with irrelevant footnotes. Another criticism was the theory of nationalism that is official nationalism is an old thesis in a new model that is practiced by the Cambridge historians He says that it’s a colonial point of view. This is one of the valid criticism of benedict Anderson that he wrote that how official nationalism was created by the elites. Anderson said these anglicized pals went to mass people and made them conscious through print capitalism and also in person. He wrote that the anglicized pals published newspapers and through this, they spread the message of nationalism, and in this way, they made people nationally conscious. Another thing Anderson told that these Anglicized pals they went to mass people to make them nationally conscious. But Guho’s criticism was that. What was the rate of literacy of Indian people? How many people could read newspapers? Also, mass people didn’t regard them as leaders because the mass people didn’t trust them. It is not logical. This is another criticism by Guho that Anderson’s theory of official nationalism is not very convincing. He said that Anderson is one-sided. He only wants to give credit to elites. By conceptualizing nationalism exclusively in terms of the interaction between the and the colonizers. Guha says that Anderson fails to acknowledge the sturdy nationalism of the mass of the people, especially the Indian peasantry. It was not the elites who alone resisted the Raj during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Even in the twentieth century, who would have known of Gandhi, Nehru, or the Congress party but for the millions of peasants who mobilized in the three big waves of the nationalist movement in 1920-2, 1930-2, and 1942-6. In Europe, the peasants made a vital contribution to Czech nationalism. In the nineteenth century, the movement was under the leadership of a man from a peasant family- Frantisek Palacky. Palacky's contribution to Czech nationalism earned for him the sobriquet ‘Father of the Nation’.
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