Op-Ed : A Spoonful of Indian Nationalism

Our identities are strongly influenced by the past. The self-perceptions that characterize a group are defined by the shared memories of the past and by the agreed allegiances that come from those recollections. While this applies generally to all societies, the past becomes a particularly thorny path when it is called on to redefine the importance of particular parts of the past and the unimportance of others. This is very much the situation in India today. The basic understandings of the national interpretation of “Indianness”, which was useful in providing a workable political and societal basis for the newly independent India, are now being subjected to severe questioning. India’s Partition along highly controversial religious lines gave added weight to notions of unity, integrity, security, and stability on both sides of the divide, making these the key ingredients of modern India’s nationalist ideologies. In the essays by Meenakshi Mukherjee and Vikram Chandra, along with the novel The Skeleton by Amrita Pritam, this post will examine the relationship between the development and expression of Indian nationalism by Indian novelists as well as its citizens.

In the Discovery of India, Jawaharlal Nehru explains that there is an understandable pride in some of the achievements of the civilization of the Indian subcontinent, but he also warned against the tendency to glorify India’s past and suppress the criticism that are also expressed in considerable abundance. There is a tendency on the part of Indian writers to solely present positive extracts from writings of European scholars and write articles and novels themselves in praise of old Indian literature and philosophy. In the essays by authors Meenakshi Mukherjee and Vikram Chandra, we can garner a very accurate glimpse into what the debate on this is.

Both authors provide interesting insights to both sides of this argument. Mukherjee is an author that argues that Indian writers who write about the country or Indian culture in English are pulling on this trope of exoticizing India and the exaggerating the truth of its history and cultural practices. Chandra is the type of writer Mukherjee is criticizing due to the fact that majority of his novels and articles on India are written in English. And up to a certain extent, Mukherjee makes very valid points. However, regardless of whether one is writing in English or in various forms of “bhasha” or regional Indian languages, it is very difficult to separate this exoticization of a country, especially when these novels are directed to the West. Chandra mentions in his essay that he has noticed “the constant hum of about the anxiety of Indianness, this notion of a real reality that was being distorted by "Third World cosmopolitans," this fear of an all-devouring and all-distorting West. And Indians who wrote in English were the one of the prime locations for this rhetoric to test itself, to make its declarations of power and belonging, to announce its possession of certain territories and its right to delineate lines of control.” (Chandra). Chandra is quick to respond to Mukherjee in his essay that authors should not take much care to those who claim that writing about India in English is somehow less authentic. It is incorrect, and fairly ignorant, to claim that an Indian writer who write in English does not share the same sense of Indian nationalism as regional writers. There is so much importance attached in interpreting India’s past to what people outside the country think of it : in description, in praise, in criticism, but this sensitivity to foreign understanding has placed an unnecessary onus on Indian writers. 

These limitations on expounding on the concept of Indian nationalism can be analyzed in two other ways. During this time of India’s Partition, nationalism and nation building were tied to a person’s changing geographic location intertwined with the religious community they were born into. The issue of fair treatment between different religious communities requires acceptance that should unite, rather than divide, the members of different Indian communities. This idea can be very clearly seen in Amrita Pritam’s novel The Skeleton. Pooro, a young Hindu girl born in India is kidnapped by a Muslim suitor who wants her for his own. When she tries to return to her home after fleeing from her kidnapper, her family refuses to accept her back due to the fact that she was held by a Muslim man for two weeks. Even though, by the end of the novel, Pooro has accepted her conversion to being a Muslim woman, the very idea that her nationhood could be stripped of her so easily shows a great divide in India’s idea of nationalism during this time period. Those who were Hindu and were born in India before the split were relocated to India while those were were Muslim or who had been born in Pakistan were suddenly considered unworthy to be called Indian. Religious culture quite as much as nationalism has always been a contested site where social groupings of differential power and privilege have vied for supremacy. To treat it as a seamless web binding the nation to revive faltering development ideas only creates a greater polarization by the state’s flaunting of a singular and uncompromising nationalist ideology.

Another limitation can be examined in one of the videos we watched in class that dealt with discrimination against Indians in the Northeast. Indian citizens there are not given the same kind of authority over their “Indianness” as those who reside and resemble mainland Indian people. This mentality has greatly affected the way in which Indian nationalism and national identity has formed in this country so much so that it is almost as if Indian society has called for an erasure of any kind of differentiation between the globalized version of an Indian citizen and the reality of Indian diversity. Nationalism did not come about by occupying the moral higher ground through its claims of cultural exclusivism. While there might have been a resistance to accepting different cultures in some strands of nationalism, this cannot amount to a lack of receptivity to humanist values that strengthened internal regeneration and reform.

The concept of nationality is a relatively new one. It would be a mistake to see the nationhood of Indians as following simply from a position-independent, objective reading of Indian history. National unity has a lot of malleability in it. The concept of a nation reflects a sense of political identity that is not split up into belonging to distinct communities, and can in principle admit anyone, irrespective of communal background, by virtue of a shared sense of political identity.