First published in 1986, this book has become a classic in the study of nationalism. Arguing against theorists such as Benedict Anderson and Ernest Gellner, Chatterjee shows that whereas nationalist thinkers in the colonial world shared the intellectual premises of the modern state based on a rational legal order and popular sovereignty developed in the West, they disagreed on who should carry out the transformation and how they must accomplish it. The outcome, Chatterjee claims, was a modern postcolonial state that was not a replica of the modern state in the West.
[Source: Orient Blackswan]