This article redefines ideas about nationhood in late colonial Bengal by studying the intersection between three main conceptual sites of identity formation—samaj (social collectivity); jati (a multidimensional term implying birth, caste, race, tribe and nation); and desh (sub-region/region/ province/country). It concentrates on how samaj was deployed to mediate the fragmentations of jati and desh in the literati's agenda of recreating a collective self and approximating nationhood. These mediations reveal how ideas about nationhood drew on pre-existing indigenous unities embedded in past samajs, and a harmonious social order that enmeshed with ‘Aryan’ cultural values. By highlighting such origins, the article seeks to qualify existing assumptions about the modernity of colonial nationalisms and their borrowed, derivative and political nature. Situating samaj in two interrelated temporal and connotative contexts—as a historical community from whence the nation emerged, and as an idea-in-practice (an ongoing social, experiential reality having a modern functionality), this article locates nationhood in a long historical tradition, to uncover the ways in which past unities were reoriented in the modern (late colonial) period to produce the notion of a nation.
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