Everyday International Relations: Editors Introduction., Khan, Sammyh S., et al. In contrast, Gandhi and the Indian National Congress are portrayed as guardians of all Indians, regardless of religious affiliation. If we, for instance, used to be able to speak of a specific Indian brand of secularism, today we need to admit that the Indian state is committed to advancing a highly particular interpretation of Hinduism and, by extension, of what it means to be Indian. However, drawing out such shared lessons on the basis of the special issue is not an easy task, given that the individual articles do not start from the same theory, method, problem, and so on.
2018.
There is, of course, also an international dimension at work here.
2015.
It is equally crucial to pose and try to answer questions about the limits of political community as grounded in shared nationhoodespecially in a region concurrently marked by majoritarianism, cross-border affinities, and transnational patterns of community-making. Misrecognition and the Indian State: The Desire for Sovereign Agency., Mannergren Selimovic, Johanna. 2021 Asian Ethnology. The first emphasizes historical developments and a certain path dependency arising from these: either in the form of an original synthesis between majority religion and nationhood, as in the case of Pakistan, or in the form of an imagery of fundamental desires that were suppressed at the time of the founding moment (that is, at the time of decolonization) that are now resurfacing, such as in the case of the ban of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) in the late 1940s.
South Asian nationalisms, as the individual contributions have demonstrated, are a great and perceptible example of this, as they do not allow for settled and totalizing views of the nation.
In Magnussons article, this is, with James C. Scott, recognized as a massive reduction of vernaculars of all kinds. In particular, he emphasizes the epistemic practices that are required to bring the periphery into line. What this suggests is that it is not sufficient to conceive of South Asian nationalisms solely on the basis of an attempt to differentiate between religious and secular nationalism, or between more or less desirable nationalism, without considering how all state-centric imaginings of nationhood and political community are committed to bringing margins and peripheries into line., Ted Svensson is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science, Lund University, Sweden.
South Asia is, more than most regions, marked by entrenched state conflicts and, as noted, a lack of regional cooperation. The nation as the principal mode of enacting and envisioning community is, hence, clearly not unique in a transhistorical sense, and it is not unique nor does it hold the status of exclusivity in the lives of many people now living in South Asia. That is, what traits of uniformity and coherence do we attribute to South Asia, and, can South Asia be assumed to constitute an integrated whole or do we need to posit the question of its unity more explicitly? Interestingly, unlike other national matters such as defense or budgets, education does not attract the attention of all major players and parties. As Jens Bartelson stresses in an ongoing project on the long nineteenth century and the transition from empires to states as the dominant units of the international system, it is a congruence that is not given, however (Bartelson 2018). The second explanation (which is fully reconcilable with the first) would instead foremost stress how a more integrated world hassomewhat paradoxically at first sightled to inward-looking needs and propensities, and how perceived uncertainties of significant groups in society result in a loss of what Anthony Giddens and others have referred to as ontological security (for more on this, see Kinnvall and Mitzen 2017). In contrast to the relatively conflicted view of 1947 in Indian textbooks, the dominant theme undergirding discussions of that year in Pakistani textbooks is liberation.
. If there is a need for enhanced and further knowledge about the population, the nation state, as Magnusson contends, foremost exists for administrative purposes, with the core undertaking being to bring the communities living in [inaccessible] areas under administration, incorporate them into the national economy, and tax them. Next to majoritarian nationalism there is, thus, if we concur with Magnusson, a parallel and intersecting postcolonial colonialism at work.
The date is portrayed as the culmination of an ineluctable political process that began with the arrival of the first Muslims to the subcontinent in pre-medieval times. As Deng Xiaoping confessed in the aftermath of the pro-democracy movement at Tiananmen, I have told foreign guests that during the last 10 years our biggest mistake was made in the field of education, primarily in ideological and political education not just of students but of the people in general.
Cohesion needs to be largely construed and imposed, rather than neatly derived from the individual contributions. The latter, as Reed expounds, does not simply lead to exclusionary practices enacted toward outsiders or what is perceived to be lesser members, it also entails and reproduces gendered asymmetries and clearly assigned roles and responsibilities within the assumed boundaries of the nation. In India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, for example, there was no immediately corresponding unified state prior to 1947 and then 1971. In this concluding commentary, the overall theme of the special issue as well as the collective contribution of the individual articles are addressed and elaborated upon. Nation as form is, however, as we know, predicated upon identifying sameness and difference; and although it is ill-suited to name this sameness in concrete and conclusive terms, it is well-suited for sorting out difference, for marking and distinguishing distance, estrangement, and subordination.
Torn asunder from their homelands, they were reduced to being refugees in alien lands. Textbook politics, then, continues apace in South Asia. Given what the idea of abjection signifies in terms of rejection, fundamental negation, and misrecognition (for more on this, see Kinnvall and Svensson 2018), Schaflechners analysis and the broader lessons drawn from it do not bode well for the progression toward mutual understanding, rather than mutual vilification. That is, as tropes of undesirable behavior, inverted mirror images, and significant others. In his article, Magnusson, for example, attends to how Baltistan in both India and Pakistan became an object of internal colonialism and state- and nation-making, [and] part of a new geography with a new geopolitical agenda. Hence, for the Balti community, Independence, Partition, [and] division [in 1947] meant the transition from one mode of colonial domination and subalternity to another (this volume). The specific narratives presented within textbooks are an outgrowth of domestic political constellations. While it might be pertinent to ascribe certain transcendent abilities to Hindutva notions of a Hindu. Let us here take the recently opened Partition Museum in Amritsar as our example. At times it goes to the extent that neighboring citizenries and internal minorities associated with these equal an abject in relation to which conceptions of nationhood assume a sense of completion, continuity, and actuality. Another common imagery is that of neighboring states as engaged in conscious attempts to incite and fuel internal disorder and subversion by way of training, funding, and supporting sub-nationalist movements or extremist organizations.
This, in turn, leads to an ensuing need to regain or restore a sense of stability, continuity, and predictability.
While the latter remains more open to diversity within each state, it remains closed to the transcending possibilities of community-making that is not foremost or exclusively bound to state-centric territoriality. The basic purpose of getting Pakistan was to provide the people an environment wherein they could lead their lives according to the basic principles of Islam. There is, as Jrgen Schaflechner maintains, a lot of mutual vilification taking place between distinct South Asian nationalismsin his own case between Pakistan and India, by way of how religious minorities are represented in popular culture.
displays of nationalistic unity fail, violence results, which challenges the notion of the nations unity and harmony. In the construal advanced here, violence is instead seen as an ever-present facet of the endeavor to achieve or display nationalistic unity. It then seems that, particularly in a South Asian context, an overly benign faith in the possibility of separating peaceful, celebratory modes of nationalistic performance from their antonym makes us less sensitized to the experiences of marginal communities and individuals than we ought to be.
For Pakistan, the date represents the triumph of an outnumbered and outgunned minority, powered solely by the inherent virtues of the Two-Nation Theory. Alongside differences in the treatment (or lack thereof) of the Two Nation Theory, the political run-up to independence enjoys greater depth if not precision in the Pakistani textbook. It remains incomplete. Such transnational affinities are not, as twentieth-century and present-day South Asia demonstrate, easily reducible to state-centric views of political community and citizenship, and they remain near-impossible to make manageable or bring to an end without the deployment of violent and repressive means.
Even though Dalit activists across the region increasingly base their work on the insight that caste is not exclusive to India or to Hindu communities and that external pressure, built through a global layer of activism, is needed to make sure that individual states commit to the eradication of casteist practices, it has proven very hard to turn the struggle against caste-based discrimination into a regional or international, rather than a domestic, issue. Institutions such as NCERT came under withering criticism by the Hindu right, which sought to infiltrate it, with some success.
We did not tell them enough about the need for hard struggle, about what China was like in the old days and what kind of country it was to become.
Challenges of Representation in South Asia., Bartelson, Jens.
There is, however, a need for even more empirically oriented work when it comes to the ways in which these factors resonate with and are shaped by ordinary peoples ongoing work in the making of lifeworlds (on the latter, see Mannergren Selimovic 2019).
Partition also meant that India changed, many of its cities changed, and a new country Pakistan was born. Overall, 1947 is more unalloyed in Pakistani than Indian textbooks. The implications of this imbalance are at once somber and striking, for it means that the most nationalistic elements of the body politic control what young people read and learn.
The term is associated with majoritarianism, the demonisation of certain groups within the political discourse of the state and the lack of access to effective power for minority communities (ibid., 7). This brings forth two additional insights: first, that there will always be mobilization attending to this intrinsic mismatch and, second, that the nation is never ubiquitous, omnipresent, and totalizing. It is therefore imperative to attend to why the present moment, despite this, equals a seemingly crucial juncture for the congealing and success of religious nationalism in the region. Through her analysis, we both come to reflect on the crucial question of how the nation might be embodied in more inclusive and desirable ways, and come to realize that the analyzed performance revolves around the very tension put in place by a lack of equivalence between community and territoriality. Accordingly, the nation both acts as a vessel for and propels collective agencyan agency, if we accept Jacqueline Stevenss account (2009), that is not only intimately linked to the active preservation of membership as foremost inherited, but also is recurrently the root cause of large-scale conflict, violence, and suffering. In the case of Hindu nationalism in India, we, for example, seem to have a reasonable grasp of its ideological foundation, the appeal of the BJP as a political party and how it compares with other similar parties globally, the type of leadership Narendra Modi represents, and so forth. By extension, it does not then ask important questions concerning the frail underpinnings of state-promoted nationalisms and the manifold sub-national affinities that exist or have existed across current state borders. With respect to the former, the textbook focuses on the waning of British power in India, particularly in the face of organized resistance and charts the birth of Indian nationalism from the middle of the nineteenth century. JIs infrastructural network, which includes publishing houses, magazines, and digests, not to mention its status as a purely ideological party, renders it the most significant of domestic actors when it comes to education politics in Pakistan. In his article on Bangladesh, Korom observes a very different content to how the state manages, maintains, and monitors religious nationalism.