Abstract
The story of nation building in India is about how the Indian multiethnic civilizational society was first straitjacketed into a single territorial state by the British colonialists and then how, in the course of becoming a ‘national society’, it became divided into three nation-states after decolonization: India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. But the story does not end at this point. In fact, as we shall see, nation building in India acquired an entirely new dimension after independence. While remaining rooted in India’s long tradition of cultural pluralism, the postcolonial project of nation building acquired new foundations in popular sovereignty, political equality and social egalitarianism. It was through a long and tumultuous process of political debates, social conflicts and changes in the self-definitions of cultural collectivities, which occurred in the colonial period, that nation building in India found its modernist ideological core. It is therefore necessary to take a look at this crucial formative phase of nation building in India.
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Notes
- 1.
For discussions on the Western and Indian traditions of historiography, see Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments, Chapter 4 (Delhi, 1994) and Ranajit Guha, An Indian Historiography of India: A Nineteenth Century Agenda and Its Implications (Calcutta, 1988), pp. 27–36.
- 2.
For an account of pre-modern modes of writing history in India, see V.S. Pathak, Ancient Historians of India (Bombay, 1996), Chapter 1; also see F.E. Pargiter, Ancient Indian Historical Tradition (Delhi, 1972). For the impact of hero-centred narratives of the past on the novel, see Meenakshi Mukherjee, Realism and Reality: The Novel and Society in India (Delhi, 1985), pp. 38–68 and Sudhir Chandra, The Oppressive Present: Literature and Social Consciousness in Colonial India (Delhi, 1993), Chapter 3, especially pp. 126–30; and on representations in folk theatre, see Kathryn Hansen, Grounds for Play: the Nautanki Theatre of North India (Delhi, 1992).
- 3.
See Sudipta Kaviraj, Crisis of the Nation-State in India, Political Studies, 42(1984), pp. 115–29.
- 4.
Raghavan Iyer (ed.), The Moral and Political Writings of Mahatma Gandhi, Vol. l (Oxford, 1986), p. 187.
- 5.
Jawaharlal Nehru was the most influential among the modernist leaders of India’s independence movement whose writings (and politics) shaped this vision of nation building. His Discovery of India (New York, 1946), which he wrote during periods of his imprisonment by the British, comprehensively articulated this vision in historical-cultural terms.
- 6.
See Chapter 5 in Partha Chatterjee’s Nationalist Thought and Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse (Delhi, 1986).
- 7.
For a balanced account of the formation of the Pakistani State after independence, see Stephen P. Cohen, ‘State Building in Pakistan’, in Ali Banuazizi and Myron Weiner (eds), The State Religion and Ethnic Politics: Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan (Lahore, 1987), pp. 299–332.
- 8.
Jyotindra Das Gupta, Language Conflict and National Development (especially Chapter 8) (New Delhi, 1970).
- 9.
See D.L. Sheth, ‘Secularization of Caste and the Making of a New Middle Class’, Economic and Political Weekly, 34–35 (21 August 1999).
- 10.
See Partha N. Mukherjee, ‘The Indian State in Crisis? Nationalism and Nation-Building’, Sociological Bulletin, 42(1) (March 1994).
- 11.
See Shahrough Akhavi, ‘State Formations and Consolidation in Twentieth Century Iran’ and Patricia J. Higgins, ‘Minority-State relations in Contemporary Iran’, in Ali Banuazizi and Myron Weiner (eds), The State, Religion and Ethnic Politics.
- 12.
For an account of progressive Islamization of the Pakistani State after partition, see John L. Eposito, ‘Islam: Ideology and Politics in Pakistan’, in Ali Banuazizi and Myron Wiener (eds), The State, Religion and Ethnic Politics.
- 13.
Amena Mohsin, ‘National Security and Minorities: The Bangladesh Case’, in D.L. Sheth and Gurprit Mahajan (eds), Minority Identities and the Nation State (New Delhi, 1999), pp. 312–32.
- 14.
Leonard Binder, ‘Islam, Ethnicity and the State in Pakistan’, in Ali Banuazizi and Myron Weiner (eds), The State, Religion and Ethnic Politics.
- 15.
For a critique of the ideology of the Indian State, see Ashis Nandy, ‘The Ideology of the Indian State’”, in Ponna Wignaraja and Akmal Hussain (eds), The Challenge in South Asia: Development, Democracy and Regional Cooperation (New Delhi, 1992), pp. 315–25; Also see Ashis Nandy. History’s Forgotten Doubles, History and Theory, 34 (1995).
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Sheth, D.L. (2018). State-Nation Building: The Making of Liberal Democracy. In: deSouza, P. (eds) At Home with Democracy . Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-6412-8_3
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