Аннотация:EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURIES witnessed the emergence and definition of nation-states across much of Asia and the Middle East.History was widely pressed into the service of this phenomenon in regions such as China, Japan, Turkey, Iran, and Algeria. 1 After all, as Eric J. Hobsbawm remarked, "nations without pasts are contradictions in terms.What makes a nation is the past." 2 In India, too, history became a public passion during this period.It came to be seen as a major site through which and on which critically important issues of Indian nationhood and tradition were articulated.In most of these regions, public debates about history and nationalism also generated intense discussions about the nature and function of history, the definition and nature of community and culture, and other related issues.A public debate among Indian intellectuals in the early twentieth century underscores the critically important role played by history in the articulation of nationhood, highlighting the sharp debates and contestations about the definition and function of history in colonial civil society.It points to the need to conceptualize history not just as a rational-positivist discipline, but also in terms of how practices that are used to commemorate the past can be located within a broad range of cultures.The debate took place in Bengal, among the Bengali literati.While most of the issues that arose in the course of this debate were framed in regional Bengali terms, they can be viewed as a subset of a broader concern with Indian nationhood and the perceived urgency to determine the type of history that could serve it.
