Within a few years, many leaders of the African anti-colonial struggles became drunk on their newly acquired power. Leaders of countries such as Libya, Egypt and Tunisia became corrupt and established brutal regimes. In some other countries like Germany, South Africa, and later in Serbia and elsewhere, nationalism became a matter of ethnic politics and the reason for people killing each other. Nationalism started to get a bad name. So much so that by the end of the twentieth century, there was hardly any legacy of nationalism left in the world that would make Europe feel good about it.
The Irish political scientist and polyglot Benedict Anderson’s views have perhaps been the most influential on ideas about nationalism in contemporary times. He said that nations in Europe, and everywhere else in the world, were in fact ‘imagined’ into existence.5 This, Anderson explained, meant that nations were not the determinate products of given sociological conditions, such as language or race or religion, but instead communities that came together to acquire tangible shape by establishing major institutional forms. He then went on to say that the historical experience of nationalism in western Europe, the Americas and Russia supplied a set of modular institutional forms, and that communities from Asia and Africa had chosen their own forms from that set.
I have one problem with Anderson’s argument. If, as Anderson posited, the rest of the world has to choose from ‘modular forms’ of nationalism supplied by Europe, America and Russia, how much is left for these communities to ‘imagine’? Is there no indigenous form of nationalism that can be established by people in the rest of the world?
Building on that same ‘problem’, I would also argue that amid all the thought that has gone into decrypting nationalism, there are at least two important assumptions that I believe might not always hold true. First, that nationalism has a political meaning; two, that there is a gallery of set ‘models’ of nationalism—ethnic nationalism, civic nationalism, religious nationalism and so on—that is doing the rounds internationally and from which countries deploy one model or the other.
On the first assumption, I concede to Anderson that communities come together on the basis of their imagination of what their country must look like. I would add that as they do so, they collectively feel a range of emotions towards their country—love, pride, a feeling of security or insecurity, inclusivity (or not), rebellion, nostalgia, responsibility—that constitute their nationalism. A country is made by the coming together of ordinary people who experience these or similar emotions towards it, and not only by those who are involved in political activities. Instead, in India, when we talk of the birth of nationalism, we refer to freedom fighters and the words and actions of contemporary politicians. Perhaps we have taken the meaning of nationalism as being political much too literally?
The second assumption—that we choose from existing models of nationhood—is so deep-seated within us in India that it has led to worrying consequences. In a chicken-and-egg situation, it has eroded our confidence in who we are as a community, and our imagination of the people we collectively and authentically want to be. We are not incapable of thinking about how we authentically and collectively feel about our country, so why have we given up? If a nation is an imagined community, why are we not imagining how our own nationalism could be?
The challenge faced by India these days is related to both these assumptions. We are losing our grip on the understanding of ourselves as a community that once came together to become India, and are running helter-skelter looking for meaning.
On the one hand, we are looking at our past in the hope that reviving ancient rituals, languages and decorum will lead us to our authentic selves. On the other hand, we are future-focused in attitude, and eager to align ourselves to the great seat of power that we believe India will surely have in the world. Yes, we realize that we need to find the nation first, in order to chart our own brand of nationalism. But until we are able to actually do so we seem to be lost, some more than others.
And so, as an easy way out, we have left it to the political folks to determine nationalism for us, following their ad hoc solutions influenced by the West that are useful for them to stay in power. Since the public assumes that nationalism is a political matter, we are following the ridiculous agenda of politicians and of them telling us ‘how to be nationalistic’.
Let us see how.
We can recognize two dominant views on nationalism in contemporary India, of which neither is new. Both are led by the political class.
The first comes from mostly left-leaning thinkers and secularists who propose a secular and culturally neutral stance towards nationalism—a Nehruvian nationalism of sorts—in which every citizen belonging to a diverse group feels like a part of India. The people of Srinagar, on 19 July 1961, applauded Nehru as he remarked:
Nationalism does not mean Hindu nationalism, Muslim nationalism or Sikh nationalism. As soon as you speak of Hindu, Sikh or Muslim, you do not speak for India. Each person has to ask himself the question: What do I want to make of India—one country, one nation or ten, twenty or twenty-five nations, a fragmented and divided nation without any strength or endurance, ready to break to pieces at the slightest shock?6
The second view on nationalism emphasizes that the relationship between the people and the nation is based on shared ethnic and territorial roots. This is a puritan view where only those who belong to the original ‘Akhand Bharat’—an entity with an imagined ethnic boundary, not the contemporary political one—must still be part of it,
