D Satish Deshpande approach to the problem of nationalism, is still with us. This is in spite of the fact that recent western theorists have made self-conscious attempts to break out of the constraints of ethnocentric perspectives.1 While these efforts have undoubtedly succeeded in broadening theoretical horizons to include socio-cultural contexts beyond western Europe, there is as yet an insufficient appreciation of the specificity 7 of third world nationalisms. Partha Chatterjee's indispensable work (Chatterjee 1986) maps the broad theoretical terrain that any attempt to come to grips with the particularity of nationalist thought in the colonial world and especially in India, must necessarily traverse. While Chatterjee's path-breaking genealogy is concerned with the philosophical presuppositions that render Indian nationalist discourse inescapably 'derivative', I wish to explore the area occupied by the nation-as-economy on this larger map. Although this is an argument that is still to be developed and tested, I would like to suggest that an important aspect of the specificity of Indian nationalism (and probably also that of other third world societies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries) is the crucial role played by discursively constructed notions of a national economy. This assertion—by itself, and in such an undeveloped form—is hardly novel. Indeed, the economic aspects of nationalism are arguably the most intensively studied in the Indian literature; but the modalities through which a nation may be 'imagined' are not among its primary concerns. While some recent western works on nationalism also treat the economic sphere (albeit more or less explicitly) as their point of departure, they display a certain ^biased cultu-ralism'—a lopsided enthusiasm for the cultural as opposed to the economic materials involved in imagining modem nations. This asymmetry of orientation does not represent a 'bias' in any simple or straightforward sense. It is not that these authors 'ignore economic factors', or that their emphasis on the cultural modalities through which the nation emerges is misplaced. What I am arguing is that, in keeping with the broader contemporary trend of a certain preoccupation with the cultural, these authors insulate economic processes from the cultural modalities they analyse so well. In other words, while they correctly insist that the nation is primarily a cultural construct, they needlessly limit the materials that are involved in this construction—the substantive content which the modality of the cultural moulds into 'nation-ness'—to 'extra-economic' conditions and processes. Given that the economy is an important, perhaps even the primary, source of raw material for the nationalist imagination in India (and probably other third world contexts as well), this one-sided cultural-ism tends to understate the particuliarities of these contexts. Perhaps the most decisive mark of a paradigm shift in the western literature on nationalism is the confident insistence on treating the nation as an imagined construction. It is assumed to be an ideologically produced concept that cannot simply be traced, through a direct cause-effect relationship, to 'objective' characteristics (like race, ethnicity, language, religion, state, geographical region, or history) that members have in common. Benedict Anderson is perhaps the best known among those who have helped to bring about this transformation. Numbers 25-26