History, Nation and Community

If it is true that emotions must be brought back into social science then to begin doing so, surely no better site exists than the study of nation-building. This paper attempts to do just this. It discusses in some detail how the nation, the cultural community and the relation between the two were imagined by historical actors in India. The author argues that a failure to achieve the objective of living within a single unified state is to be explained not just by economic and religious causes but by a lack of political imagnination shaped as it was by distinct conceptions of nation and community, as by differing emotions.