Playing the Nation Game: The Ambiguities of Nationalism in India

0.0

In his significant new work Playing the Nation Game Benjamin Zachariah examines the tension between the nation idea as a necessary language of legitimacy with which to claim liberation, and its role in disciplining people and their identities in India in the name of national liberation. Focusing on the anti-colonial struggle and the subsequent Nehruvian period, and necessarily on histories of interconnected and travelling ideas, it seeks to show the ambiguities, exclusions and consequent dangers of nationalism, and the ways in which scholarship and politics conspire to reify nationalist frameworks. It explodes spurious claims to indigenous traditions , and argues for a consistent separation of the categories state and nation . In doing so, it examines the historiography of India and of anti-colonial nationalisms, looks at Bengali engagements with progress and British rule, at the invention of Hinduism as a category available for national use, and at Nehruvian nationalism, which with its broad definition of national belonging, fails to delineate nationals from non-nationals. In the process, it provides ways of rethinking the standard narratives of Indian history. Interconnected narratives emerge with a common thread, a concern with writing histories of India that cannot be subsumed within a bland and obligatory history of Indian nationalism. Attempting to open up new lines of thinking, possible research agendas, and ways of reading and teaching Indian history, Playing the Nation Game will be of interest to scholars of history and political studies, as well as to a wider audience of political, concerned persons for whom the claims made upon citizens in the name of nationalism have at times seemed less than comfortable.

0.0

Benjamin Zachariah is currently Reader in South Asian History at the University of Sheffield, and a senior research fellow at the Zentrum Moderner Orient in Berlin. He is the author of Nehru (Routledge, 2004), and Developing India: An Intellectual and Social History, c. 1930-1950 (OUP, 2005).