The Construction of History and Nationalism in India by Guichard Sylvie

Author:Guichard, Sylvie.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Interdisciplinary Studies
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)
Published: 2010-06-28T16:00:00+00:00

5

Perspectives and silences

The old history textbooks transmit a national history just like their NDA counterparts. However, each narrative conveys a different representation of history, which builds a different nation. But even though the two historical discourses adopt opposing stances when depicting the nation, we cannot ignore the fact that they have developed in the same context, that they are based on the same categories and that they share the same foundational assumptions. In other words, the two discourses fit into the same framework; both secularist and Hindu nationalists are a part of the grand narrative of the nation-state, of modernization and progress, but they propose two different versions of it.

The history narrated by secularists, just like the one narrated by Hindu nationalists, is inevitably fragmentary and even more so as the two narratives are national histories or Bildungsromane of the nation-state. They recount the evolution of the nation treated as an entity. The preceding chapters looked at these narratives as nationalist discourses. Henceforth, the study will concentrate on the process of homogenization set in motion by these narratives by analysing the curricula and the history textbooks. I will show how the perspectives adopted in the discourses produce some measure of uniformity and how the silences in these discourses have resulted in the absence of several categories of the population in the representation of history.

Generally speaking, a nationalist discourse has a homogenizing effect because it covers several categories constituting a wider national category and presents all the people grouped together in this manner as sharing common traits that transcend differences of gender, class, caste, region, etc. The representation of a homogeneous people is a fundamental element common to all nationalist discourses. The nation is conceived as an entity bringing together individuals who share a feeling of belonging. As a result, it does not easily admit diversity as this is likely to pose a threat to national unity. It is actually this representation of a homogeneous people that allows one to speak of nationalisms in the plural form and to consider different phenomena as the expression of a general phenomenon (or a common-ism) (Greenfeld 1992: 7). However, even though the people and the nation are described as being uniform, they do not become uniform, or they become so only partially. Yet, I am not implying that these nationalizing discourses have no effect on a particular territory. There is certainly some degree of assimilation with what Smith calls the dominant ethnie (Smith 1991: 39; Kaufmann and Zimmer 2004). In India’s case, ‘sanskritisation’ is a well-documented assimilation process (Srinivas 1991, see below). However, this type of homogenizing discourse tends to ignore a large number of disparities. This is inherent in any nationalist discourse that is based on, and finds its justification in, the unity of the nation. In India, the two discourses that we have analysed seek and construct this homogeneity. They believe that the lack of national unity could lead to the nation’s disintegration. That is why the nation must strengthen the bonds between its different elements and reintegrate those that have been left out.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.