From a lecture given by Partha Chatterjee during a 1996 visit to Africa:
Modernity for us is like a supermarket of foreign goods, displayed on the shelves: pay up and take awaywhat you like. No one there believes that we could be producers of modernity. The bitter truth about our present is our subjection,our inability to be subjects in our own right. And yet, it is because we want to be modern that our desire to be independent and creative is transposed on to our past. It is superfluous to call this an imagined past, because pasts are always imagined. At the opposite end from ‘these days’ marked by incompleteness and lack of fulfillment, we construct a picture of ‘those days’ when there was beauty, prosperity and a healthy sociability, and which was, above all, our own creation. ‘Those days’ for us is not a historical past; we construct it only to mark the difference posed by the present.More here (pdf)