Practicing the Nation in Postcolonial India
Sailen Routray
Narratives that on the one hand locate nations as an inevitable byproduct of capitalist modernity, and on the other hand view the nation as a territorial community evoking an affective and imaginative identification, have traditionally framed the literature surrounding nations and nationalism. Srirupa Roy’s book Beyond Belief is an attempt to address such a dichotomy not by merely attempting a hybridization of these two types of narratives, but by changing the very nature of the questions that are being addressed.
Instead of asking questions about the nature of the category of the nation and the processes through which the contemporary age has come to be the era of nation-states, she asks how is it that the nation-state is made available to us, and what are the modes of its operation that make it identifiable.
She tries to do this by looking at the ways through which the nation and the state came to be simultaneously constituted in postcolonial India unlike in modern Europe where there was a temporal lag between the formation of the nation and the modern nation-state. This co-constitution led to the production of a “stated nation” (p 114) in India.
The book tries to describe few of the ways in which such a stated nation was made available to the citizens of India. Chapter 1 describes the ways in which the documentaries produced by the Films Division of India (a Government of India agency in charge of producing documentaries and newsreel) literally made the state and its activities available to the vision of the citizens with a signature style that more often than not produced boredom and disenchantment. But these acts of representation were made possible not by the diktats of a strong unitary state, rather they were co-produced by a variety of social actors.
The next chapter discusses the modes through which the postcolonial state reinvented the 26th of January as the republic day of the new stated nation, and utilised the Republic Day parades held In New Delhi to represent itself as the only agency capable of wielding together a diverse nation.
The next two chapters shift the discussion from representations of the state to the varied effects of its developmental interventions. Chapter 3 discusses the ways in which the scientific-developmental endeavours of the state represented India as a region of darkness that can only reach the goal of development at some indeterminate time in the future by a state-promoted process of science-led development.
The next chapter documents the fall of grace of the steel towns (housing public sector steel plants) as the discourse surrounding them changed from celebrating them as exemplary national spaces that would produce (apart from steel, that is) a new citizenry unmarked by any primordial identities, to their representation as dystopian cityscapes (following the riots in east Indian steel town of Rourkela in 1964) from which the ‘communal virus’ would spread to the rest of the country.
The author identifies three key features of the discourses produced by and about the Indian nation-state; they are, the naturalization of the social diversity of India, the state as the only entity capable of both safeguarding the nation as well as representing it, and the problematization of politics. This book is a welcome addition to the culture of politics in India, and charts new territory by foregrounding the state in the discussions surrounding the nation.
By forcing us to look at the historically contingent nature of the ways in which the nation and the state have been co-produced and co-constituted in postcolonial India, and the contradictions inherent in such a process, it offers us a way out of the arid theoretical discussions surrounding the so-called postcolonial condition.
Details about the Book: Srirupa Roy. 2007. Beyond Belief: India and the Politics of Postcolonial Nationalism. Durham and London: Duke University Press. ISBN 9780822340010
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