Paper short abstract:

This paper maps out the trajectory of the idea of Indian nation and the centrality of regional imaginaries to this supposedly normative concept by analyzing the dialectical relationship between the structures of capital and culture.

Paper long abstract:

The road taken to the making or even imagining the idea of a nation in a colonial context was often besieged with internal contradictions centered over the complex relationship between economy, polity and culture. The nationalist imaginaries about the Indian nation and its form were immensely diverse and competitive drawing from different geographical locations and regions, the latter oftentime characterized as the voices of dissent from the margins or peripheries of the nation-in-making. In my paper, I aim to map out the trajectory of the idea of Indian nation and its peripheral forms by analyzing the dialectical relationship between the structures of capital and culture. This relationship was regionally varied and differed to the extent that multiple forms and imaginations of the Indian nation began to be articulated from regional frontiers and borders inhabiting the cultural-linguistic zones of its economy and politics. In this regard, the territorial nationalism of twentieth-century colonial India is one of deep-seated antinomies centered over the relationship between core and periphery or the centre and its margins, particularly in the spheres of languages and their cultural habitus. This challenges any kind of uniform notion of a nation and allows us to take into consideration, quite seriously, the lesser known histories and voices of resistance against the hegemonic and totalistic notions of a nation.