CHAPTER 1
Rambhakts: Defining "Us" and
Depicting "Our Story"
The philosophical underpinnings of the Enlightenment, the political
organization of the nation-state, and the academic discipline of history
all came to South Asia under the colonial and Orientalist package. Ever
since the Enlightenment, Western civilization has been considered a prod-
uct of rational human action guided by scientific reason, which enables
obtaining a better view of reality. Tending to be absolutist with respect
to the rationality of the nature of the world and of the human mind, the
positivists or empirical realists within the Indological discourse denied
Indians the power to represent themselves and appropriated that power
for themselves.^1 In India, just like in other colonized areas of the world,
nation and national history are the culminations of the struggles to regain
that power.
NATION, NATIONALISM, AND NATIONAL HISTORY
Nation and nationalism are variously defined and described. The imagi-
nation explanation treats the nation as an abstract concept that emerges in
specific historical circumstances in which human agency and imagination
play a crucial role. The evolutionary explanation regards the rise of nations
as an inevitable process in the "movement of history" and a necessary and
beneficial stage in the development of human society. The nation-building
concept of Karl Deutsch points to the underlying sociodemographic pro-
cesses that set in motion and fuel the growth of nations and activities of
the nationalists. In the constructed arguments, historians reemphasize the