Imagined Economies nant modes in which the Indian nation has been imagined is as a community of producers, as an economy. Attempting to read some of the contemporary literature on the nation against its culturalist grain, I will try to provide a preliminary sketch of the idea of 'nation-ness' and its changing relationship to the idea of the econ-^ omy in the Indian context. Finally, I will suggest that the current conjuncture constitutes a critical watershed in that the nation is being disarticulated from the economy; or, what is the same thing, the notion of the economy is being denuded of its content such that it can no longer participate in the idea of the nation. THE NATION IN RECENT WESTERN SOCIAL THEORY: A BIASED CULTURALISM? Communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/ genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined. (Anderson 1983: 15) Evaluating the early literature on nationalism in an essay published in 1980, Sarvepalli Copal concludes that its failures were due to a combination of ethnocentric biases and political vested interests. The emergence of modem nationalism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was a phenomenon 'which lay primarily outside Europe and was a consequence of the encounter between western imperialism and non-western peoples. But the horizons of western thinkers were limited to Europe; and from that they jumped, at one move, to internationalist principles.' Since both Marxists and free market liberals in the west were affected by this ethnocentrism, the field was left open to those whose analyses were 'vitiated by self-interest': the apologists for western imperialism who were dismissive of, and the protagonists of anti-imperialist struggles who celebrated, the third world nationalisms of the time. The latter, in their search for ideological ammunition, relied not only on 'what was often a mythical past', but also on the writings of European philosophers which were actually about 'nationalism of a different type' (Copal 1980: 90-91). Much has changed in the dozen years since Copal's review, but not enough. One of the problems he mentions, namely, the tendency to make extravagant historical and philosophical claims, is an old one common to both first as well as third world nationalisms. Indeed, it forms the core of the riddle that nationalism presents to social theory: its undeniable political efficacy despite its obvious historical errors and logical excesses. Recent western theory has developed a much more complex and sophisticated approach to this paradox than was possible or attempted in the earlier literature. Much of this theoretical sophistication is directly or indirectly attributable to the developments since the sixties in neo-marxism and in post-structuralist theory. Perhaps the most decisive change is that the newer writers do not experience any theoretical embarrassment or discomfort at the invocation of a 'mythical' (rather than a historically authenticated) past. The phenomenon of nationalism is now investigated more in terms of its modality than its defensibi-lity: as a 'how?' rather than a 'why?' question. However, Copal's second problem, namely, a more or less Eurocentric Journal of Arts & Ideas