Polemics are meant to distil ideas yet they seldom manage to do this. Instead, as my recent quabbles regarding a certain JNUSU leader revealed, they tend to obfusicate matters by forcing you to hold on to your stand even while conceding some ground. The two goals are contradictory, causing your own understanding to get thoroughly muddled. Understanding, I say, assuming you’ve done some amount of thinking on the topic.
Yet when the heat of debates die out, the original questions often remain. Perhaps simply because nobody could win the debate, neither you, nor them. Your mind keeps going back, and the ideas become clear again. Funnily, however, the questions seem to change now; the clarity remains.
Take the case of this new KK, one who sings tunes that mesmerize people. If the debate were regarding him alone, it’d have taken two dimensions – one of political power, the other of individual rights. Instead, his defenders and opponents dragged the nation into the whole business. KK became an epitome of the freedom the nation sought, or the abused freedom that destroyed it.
But this is my blog, so let’s keep KK out. Let’s talk of the nation.
Nation, as Benedict Anderson would put it, is an “imagined community” where everyone feels a certain bond even without meeting or knowing anything about the person other than he/she belongs to the same nation. Many who attack KK today would deny the word “imagined”, seeking something more concrete in its stead, conveniently forgetting that it too was constructed. Take Bharat Mata Ki Jai. The concept arose from the conflation of Bharat with the Mother figure during the late 19th and early 20th Century. The classic example is the art of Abanindranath Tagore, stylizing Bharat Mata in the image of his departed daughter in one stead, and as a tigress (stripes and all) in another.
But Bharat Mata does not exist in reality, never did. The image is every bit as real as the images of deities. They are real because we believe they are so. This believing is a choice which is supposed to be conscious yet which a good many forces – religious and nationalistic – would have us believe is automatic. We are supposed to be automatons in the service of a nation we must never question.
But say we rediscover our choice. One fine day, liberated by our knowledge, we realize that we can, after all, not pay homage to the idea of Bharat Mata, or any mata, for that matter. We can choose to believe in anything, or nothing, or a combination of anything and everything. We become masters of our own selves, our position in nature decided by us and us alone. Nature – and nation.
The taste of such liberty is exhilarating. Did not the great Rabindranath Tagore move in and out of the nationalist camp (his nationalism was his own, but let’s use the prevalent language) in the space of the Swadeshi movement ? Did not he believe in founding a school that would work on global ideals rather than anything parochially Indian ? Did he not put humanity before his colony ?
It is a fine thing to bask in this liberty for a day, a week, or forever. Rarely are we asked to do anything proactive in support of the nation, and this is as much a critique of the man as the state which governs the nation. Standing for the Anthem here, paying taxes there, these are the little mandatory things, small and big irritants to some perhaps, that give us a sense of being committed to the nation.
But hold on, did we not debunk an accepted marker of the nation? Do we debunk the nation, or do we find another marker? To be truly radical perhaps, it is necessary to be an anarchist or Anabaptist. Given that anarchism alongside Communism, chances are if you’re going left, you’d end up becoming an anarchist. If you are a firm believer in God, you’d become an Anabaptist. Either way, you end up outside the nation. In doing so, you move outside the structure that governs the nation – the state. Wohooo!
Alternatively, you could ask, can I believe in the nation without believing in what the nation wants me to believe in ? Say, you’re told that the nation wants you to believe in Bharat as a Mata, a protective motherly figure who at the same time is righteous and with your help, can overthrow the unjust yoke of British rule (errata – British rule is dead, so it’s probably some foreign thingy or external threat or ebola. Yeah, something that threatens her children).
You argue that after all, this idea is dated. It was framed in the era of colonial rule, to fight a colonial government. Both are gone, and we have moved through an entire age of pseudo-socialistic-mixed economy to be dragged into globalization. Isn’t it better to find an image that binds us in the present day ? Something that is Indian but is relevant to the times ?
Are you implying that nationalism is outdated? No sir, not at all. I’m implying that our imagination of nationalism is outdated. It is ossified to a degree where it is held up by empty rhetoric and a few symbols for obeisance. It is ossified to a degree where it has to be imposed on a good many without evoking any real feeling inside them.
But what if you found another ideal ? Something that has potential for acting as the glue that binds the nation together, without pandering to the view of “the nation”? What happens when you begin to believe in a conception of nation that brings together all (or most) of those who could believe in the conception, but in reality only you believe in it? Do you shelve your ideal or propagate it ?
Suppose you propagate it, what happens? Does the existing glue, the Bharat Mata for example, prove to be syncretic enough (like the real Mother Goddess cult proved to be) to modify itself to accommodate you? Or does yours become a rival, a different view of the same nation, an anomaly in the sea of Bharat Mata-ists ?
In reality, chances are that both the Bharat Mata ideal and your own would be two among many. All of these would lay claim to being the ideal of nationalism, the imaginary glue that binds the community together, by virtue of having some “features”. What are these ? What is the Minimum Programme that allows an ideal to be nationalistic and another to be not ? Or is it a maximum ?
Say for instance, your ideal of the nation does not involve respect to a certain National X. If the Minimum is X, then you could build on X and still allow the ideal to act as the glue. If the maximum is X, then your entire ideal must fit inside it. The risk with X minimum is that the maximum could become very vague. A maximum X would limit the wriggling space needed for alternatives to emerge.
This brings us to the question of diversity. Our motto, it seems, is unity in diversity. This can presuppose a maximum or minimum X. At maximum, it demands that every belief of every individual fall within the X ideal. At minimum, it demands that each belief have at least some respect, but not be limited to X. On the face of it, the minimum seems to be better, because it seems more assimilationistic.
However, what if X itself is so defined that it becomes hard yet broad ? Say X is the Indian Rupee. If you believe in the nation, you must believe, trade in, quote in, conceptualize the economy in, the rupee. If you use the dollar instead, you are not part of the nation. Would it be ideal to make this X minimum ? So every person in India can trade in the Euro, pound or Dollar as long as he/she trades in rupees ? It would lead to loss of financial sovereignty for India and create mass fiscal chaos.
Now say, you find there to be a maximum X (not the Indian rupee please, I do care about my bank balance!), and you disagree regarding its maximality. You would rather place something else in its stead. Can you put up this contrasting ideal without breaking down the glue that binds the community? In other words, does the nation have a bond that is perhaps outside what we consciously imagine? Can the bond of the community have a palette that allows for mixing of colours instead of being made up of solidified colours entirely?
To say no would be to claim that our nationalism is not deep enough, that we are weak nationalists and for this reason we cling to outdated concepts for dear life of the nation. To say yes would be opening a Pandora’s box which could well cause explorations to plumb such depths and niches that the bond itself is fatally undermined.
It goes without saying that the modern world is a world of nations. Nations protect its people, fight for resources, allow or block trade, uphold rights and wage wars. We are fortunate to have a nation, whatever and however it may be defined, that is stable and diverse at the same time. We have every right to open the settings box and work with the wires, indeed upgradation of the box is necessary from time to time. But we should be aware that random tinkering can well lead to a fire.
Electrical fires cannot be put out with water.