Partha Chatterjee

Abstract

This interview with Partha Chatterjee, conducted in Calcutta, India, on 10 March 1998, was one of several interviews I conducted for a project that examines the possibilities and limits of postcolonial theor(ies) and practice(s) in the context of India. Although in the interview Chatterjee never once describes his work or that of the Subaltern Studies collective as ‘postcolonial’ or as an example of ‘postcolonial’ criticism, Gyan Prakash does view the intervention in South Asian historiography accomplished by Subaltern Studies as an instance of postcolonial criticism. Indeed, Chatterjee's recent Nation and it Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories exemplifies some of the critical procedures which Prakash defines as postcolonial — privileging the fragment, allotting considerable space to colonial knowledge(s), and what Prakash, following Spivak, defines as ‘the complex catachrestic reworking of [these] knowledge[s]’. That this is in evidence in work that has also been viewed as fundamental to any contemporary assessments of nationalism tells us of another area to which Chatterjee's work is indispensable. Among his many books, the two most routinely cited in the metropolitan academy are: Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse and The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories.