SOCIAL SCIENTIST the Nation (London: Verso, 1996), p.2. I am changing the tense in which Anderson is delivering these remarks. The contemporaneity that attaches to Anderson's introduction cannot be lost sight. For him, "this disjunctive (the compulsion to think about nationalism comparatively and globally, but also, being singularly concrete, in very particular terms) and the theoretical stumble that it causes, helps to explain some of the history of serious thinking about nationalism, its hiatuses and bursts of energy"(ibid.). The inspiration here is clearly Ernest Gellner, especially his Nations and Nationalism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983). See Miroslav Hroch for a rebuttal of the terms of this theory; Hroch's general theses and also Gellner's critical response and defense of his own position can be had in Gopal Balakrishnan (ed.), Mapping the Nation, op.cit., pp.78-97 and 98-145 respectively. I have in mind here Partha Chatterjee's Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse? (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1986), Ch.l. Chatterjee attacks Gellner and others for sociologism and modularity. It is perhaps significant that when the contours of this investigation are extended, the target has shifted to Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983); Chatterjee's The Nation and its Fragments (op.cit.) begins with a critique of Anderson, posing frontally the question 'Whose Imagined Community?'. Indeed, here, as Anderson has noted, "elite nationalism in Asia and Africa receives a somewhat warmer evaluation than in his previous writing" ('Introduction' in Gopal Balakrishnan, op.cit., p. 11). I am here alluding to Charles Taylor's appraisal of the intertwining of modernity and nationalism in a volume devoted to examining every aspect of Gellner's theory. The essay is titled 'Nationalism and Modernity' and obtains in John A. Hall (ed.), The State of the Nation: Ernest Gellner and the Theory of Nationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp.191-218. The lines cited are on p.207. The formulation bears comparison with Javeed, especially the latter's point that "intellectual moves (within the space of tradition) were provoked by challenges from outside the domain of tradition" (ILM, 173). See also n.65 above, and the lines in the text from which that note springs. Taylor further notes: "Elites have always been able to experience a dramatic loss of dignity in the face of conquering power. One way of responding is to fight back or come to terms with the conquerors out of the same traditional identity and sense of honour. Another is to force a new categorical identity to be the bearer of the sought-for dignity. It is (a sub-species of) this second reaction that we call nationalist; but it is essentially modern" (ibid., p.207). For this see generally Adrian Hastings, The Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion and Nationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). It is significant that, for Hastings, "(t)he specific root of nationalism does not lie in the circumstances of post-Enlightenment modernity. On the contrary. It lies rather in the impact of the Bible, of vernacular literature, and of the two combined in creating a politically stable ethnicity, effectively 'imagined' by its members across a unique mythology" (ibid., p.151). See also Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), for an effort to reverse the order of precedence and therefore of causality. Rather than define nationalism by its