Sagar IV No. 2 — Fall 1997

A SOUTH ASIA RESEARCH JOURNAL Muslim nationalism in South Asia or other movements around the world, it is not appropriate for the BJP. My main objection to the term is that it implies legitimation from forces greater than humanity and society. While sacred texts, gods, and deities are invoked, they are not done so because of their divine authority. They are invoked, as we shall see, when they are perceived to be relevant to India's current needs as determined on the basis of rational reasoning. Hence they are correct in describing themselves as cultural nationalists because religion is secondary within their ideology.

The argument advanced here contrasts cultural nationalism with secular nationalism. The latter is defined as a movement that seeks to create an autonomous state legitimated by rationality and impartiality. It is basically the project of Rousseau's Le Contract Social, in which each person is fundamentally free but as a citizen is willing to sacrifice certain rights knowing that he or she must live in society. In India this is represented by Nehru and the Congress party with their emphasis on secularism, centralized economic planning, rapid industrialization, and socialism.

My thesis draws its definition of "modernity" primarily from the works of Frederic Jameson and Charles Taylor. Because of their ability to cut into the deepest assumptions of 20th century Western culture their analyses are extremely useful. Unfortunately both are also guilty of serious Eurocentrism: they make claims about the "culture of modernity" on a global scale while disregarding the non-Western world, the impact of the West on the non-West, and the impact of the rest of the world on the West.

Their insights can be rescued from that shortcoming and made applicable to South Asia by modifying Jameson's concept of the "cultural dominant," which is the hegemonic culture that defines an era or period (i.e. modernity or postmodernity). Since the subaltern studies group has demonstrated that large sections of the South Asian population impute signifiers of modern society with very different meanings, it is scarcely possible to claim anything as a cultural dominant in that part of the world.

Thus I propose that the category of modernity be used to denote a cultural formation that exists as a discourse (or sets of discourses) and vies for dominance with other cultural formations. Modernity's cultural formation can be identified by the following nexus of characteristics: the valuation of instrumental reason, a belief in a knowable, positive reality, and—most importantly for this study—the conception of the self as a disengaged subject that is singular and autonomous. With this definition it becomes possible to construct modernity as present in any given time or place, however its presence and status must be demonstrated empirically through discourse analysis. So defined, the category can account for difference while still allowing us to make generalizations. Differences engendered by Fredric Jameson, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), p. 3-4.