The Construction of History and Nationalism in India

Textbooks, Controversies and Politics

Sylvie Guichard

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780415565066
• eBook ISBN: 9781136949302
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Política

Most studies on nations and nationalism argue that history, or more precisely a 'common past', is crucial for the process of national identity building. However, the existence of one or more concurrent narratives for the construction of this identity is often not accounted for, and there are cases where the 'common past' or a 'collective memory' is no longer shared.

This book centres on the construction, elaboration and negotiation of the narratives that have become official history in India. These narratives influence politics and the representation of the nation. Depending on the chosen definition of the nation, over 160 million Muslim Indians are either included or excluded from the nation, and considered as 'foreigners from inside'. The author shows that beyond the antagonism of two representations of history, two conceptions of the Indian nation – secular and Hindu nationalist – confronted each other during the history textbook controversy between 1998 and 2004. The diverging elements of the two discourses are underlined, and surprising similarities are uncovered. Yet, in contemporary India this convergence remains overshadowed in political debates as the definition of the political has been shaped by the opposition between these two visions of the nation. This book analyzes and questions the conception of the school textbook as a tool of national construction and more generally highlights the complexity of the link between historiography, nation-state and nation-building.

1
Nation, religion and history

Discourse, nation and nationalism

A discursive conception of the nation and nationalism

Since this book is about the contemporary representations of the Indian nation, it is necessary to clarify where I stand within the fragmented field of research on nations and nationalism. Anthony D. Smith distinguishes five approaches in the studies on nationalism depending on the answers given by researchers to the questions ‘What is a nation?’ and ‘When is a nation?’ (Smith 1998: 223). He makes a distinction between the primordialist, perennialist, modernist, ethnosymbolist and postmodernist approaches.

The ‘common denominator’ of scholars upholding a primordialist approach is ‘their belief in the antiquity and naturalness of nations’ (Özkirimli 2000: 64). The perennialists believe as well that the nation has been there since time immemorial, but they differentiate themselves from the primordialists by affirming that nations do not constitute natural phenomena but historical and social phenomena (Grosby 1991; Hastings 1997; Llobera 1994).

The modernist approach sees the nation as a phenomenon that appeared at the end of the eighteenth century. Its development resulted from changes brought about by modernization such as industrialization and capitalism (Anderson 1999; Breuilly 1996; Gellner 1983; Hobsbawm 2000). In this view, nationalism replied to functional needs of modernizing societies. As for the ethnosymbolists, they too believe that the emergence of the nation is a modern phenomenon, but they differ from the modernists by stressing the nation’s premodern origins. Anthony D. Smith coined the term ‘ethno symbolism’ and is the main defender of this approach (see also Armstrong 1982; Hutchinson 1987 and 2005). He recognizes that there is too much discontinuity between premodern and modern communities to assert that modern nations are the result of incremental changes that took place in the former. However, according to this scholar, ‘there is considerable evidence that modern nations are connected with earlier ethnic categories and communities and created out of pre-existing origin myths, ethnic cultures and shared memories’ (Smith 1996: 385).

The fifth position identified by Smith is the postmodern one. But under this heading, he brings together studies influenced by historical or epistemic postmodernism as well as methodological postmodernism.¹ According to historical postmodernism, the modern period is over or has, at the least, undergone profound changes: a new environment, characterized at the same time by movements of globalization and regionalization, influences the development of nations and nationalism. Studies adopting a methodological postmodernist approach stand out due to the philosophical and methodological assumptions of their authors. These scholars contest in particular the existence of a reality that can be represented through the use of language and of an objectivity that is not socially constructed. As far as nationalism is concerned, methodological postmodernism insists on the processes of construction of a particular sort of identity. The role of the analyst following such an approach is to deconstruct the processes of identification in order to understand how it is produced, how and why people adhere to such a discourse (Walker 2001: 621).

Although the classification proposed by Smith is useful to disentangle the burgeoning of this field of research, it is not unanimously accepted by researchers (for a critical analysis, see Özkirimli 2000: 212–19). Furthermore, it is necessary to point out that these approaches enjoy very different status in the on-going academic debate where defenders of the primordialist position have become an endangered species. In contrast, this understanding dominates outside academic circles and forms the core of nationalist discourses (Gil-White 1999; Özkirimli 2000: 67). The contemporary academic debate is mainly between modernists, ethnosymbolists and postmodernists. The stress put by ethnosymbolists on the ethnic origins of nations is, however, deemed by some to be a primordialist or perennialist element (Gellner 1996: 366). According to ethnosymbolists, the nation develops from its ethnic roots, which constitute the essence of that particular nation. From this point of view, they can be considered as essentialists, just like the primordialists and perennialists.

Essentialism means ‘a reduction of the diversity in a population to some single criterion held to constitute its defining “essence” and most crucial character… . It is common to assume that these cultural categories address really existing and discretely identifiable collections of people’ (Calhoun 1997: 18). In contrast, constructivism rejects any essentialism in social organization and focuses on the study of the production, development, evolution and interrelations of social differences and social categories (Schwandt 1994). This approach is concerned with systems of representation, social practices and discourses.² Applied to the study of nationalism, this frame of analysis emphasizes the intersubjective character of the process of national identity formation (Özkirimli 2000: 217). However, to say that national identities are socially constructed is only a starting point. It is then necessary to clarify how, and what ‘construction’ exactly means. Does it mean free invention or, rather, rearranging pre-existing elements? Here disagreements begin.

In the following section, I will clarify how I conceptualize the nation within the broad frame of constructivism and what are, according to me, the limits of construction. This conception can be summarized in three propositions. First, the term ‘nation’ does not represent a substantial entity; it is an element of categorization. Second, the nation is considered as an idea that is being continuously reconstructed by discourse. Finally, the idea of nation-building is not limited to the instrumentalization of this category by the political elite. I will take up these three elements and discuss them in the following paragraphs.

First, nations should not be conceptualized as substantial entities.³According to Brubaker, the term ‘nation’ is too often used as representing a real community. In doing this, one treats a category as a group. What distinguishes a group from a category is the interaction between its members: members of the same category are brought together by classification, but that does not mean that they interact, while the members of a group do interact (Brubaker 2002: 168–9).⁴ By treating a category as a group, that is called ‘nation’ in this case, the members of this category believe that they belong to a homogeneous group (Bourdieu 1991). Anderson argues along the same line when he claims that the nation is ‘imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion’ (1999: 6, italics in the original). This mobilization around one of the elements of categorization can lead to its crystallization and it can even strengthen the links between some members of this category that might become a group.

Second, the nation is regarded as a process, an idea that is being continually reshaped by discourse. Narratives are by nature performative (Austin 1965; Searle 1991: 255); they produce what they describe (Bourdieu 1991). Hence, the discourse on national identity produces the nation. The nation is what is said about it (saying being understood in a very wide sense in this case). The assertion that the nation is not a natural reality, but that it is built through narratives does not mean that the consequences of this imagined community are not real. The discourse on the nation makes it ‘real’. The reality of the nation and the strength of the feelings it inspires do not depend on the existence of a substantial group or a substantial nation, but on the discourse on this group (Brubaker 2002: 168).

It is necessary to point out the distinction between the terms ‘discourse’ and ‘narrative’. I do not understand the term ‘discourse’ in the narrow literal sense, but in a wider sense as ‘systems of meaning, including all types of social and political practice, as well as institutions and organisations’ (Howarth 1995 quoted in Mottier 2000: 536). In contrast, the term ‘narrative’ is used in the narrower sense of a story. Accordingly, ‘[s]pecific narratives of the nation are construed as important component parts of broader discourses of national identity’ (Mottier 2000: 537).

Margaret Somers and Gloria Gibson make a distinction between two concepts of narrativity: the first, which is older, is representative and the second, which is more recent, is ontological (see also Lyotard 1979: 35–53). The representative concept views the narrative only as a form given to the chaos of experiences by social and human sciences in order to make some sense of this chaos. But narrativity is also considered as much more, as an ‘ontological condition of social life’ (Somers and Gibson 1996: 38). Narrativity is not, therefore, simply a method of representing reality. It is also a component of this reality.

[S]tories guide action; … people construct identities … by locating themselves or being located within a repertoire of emplotted stories; … ‘experience’ is constituted through narratives; … people make sense of what has happened and is happening to them by attempting to assemble or in some way to integrate these happenings within one or more narratives; and … people are guided to act in certain ways, and not others, on the basis of the projections, expectations, and memories derived from a multiplicity but ultimately limited repertoire of available social, public, and cultural narratives.

(Somers and Gibson 1996: 38–9)

The different aspects of identity are thus made up of narratives. One of these narratives is about the nation and constitutes national identity. Through narrations, we understand the social world and it is only by situating ourselves within these social narratives that we can build our own identity (Taylor 1994).

Third, the (performative) discourse does not emerge in a world devoid of previous social constructions. For this reason, my understanding of the concept of nation distances itself from the instrumentalist dimension of some con structivist studies that conceptualize the nation as resulting from manipulation by the elite of mobilizing themes with the aim of increasing their own power. Several scholars developed and defended this idea that the nation is a ‘tool’ used by the elite to attain their end (Brass 1974; Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983; for a critical assessment, see Fearon and Laitin 2000). These studies envisage the instrumentalization of national identity as a ‘top-down’ process; this is what Maleševi (2002: 210) calls ‘power elite approaches’. The reverse bottom-up instrumentalist approach exists also but has few representatives. It is supported principally by authors (who are not constructivists) who subscribe to the theory of rational choice. Very roughly summarized, the core idea suggests that individuals use their membership in an ethnic group according to the advantages they can gain from it (i.e. Hechter 1987; for a critical analysis, Maleševi 2002).

However, I believe that the instrumentalization and manipulation (whether top-down or bottom-up) of the idea of the nation are limited by several factors. A person’s (national) identity is the result of two processes (exo-identification and self-identification) that influence each other and that are part of a certain ‘discursive context’ (Suny 2001: 868). An identity is conferred on us by others (this is exo-identification) and we also ‘choose’ or identify with an identity (this is self-identification). In the interaction between these two processes, exo-identification weighs more than self-identification. The freedom to self-identify is restricted, first, because in the life of an individual self-identification intervenes after one has been socialized with a certain exo-identification and, second, because the social ratification of the ‘chosen’ identification is necessary. For example, even if a person decides to identify herself as Basque, it is not enough to make her a Basque. It is necessary that other Basques recognize her as ‘one of them’. This dual process and the fact that it fits within a particular cultural context limits, on the one hand, the elite’s room for manoeuvre because individuals must be able to identify themselves with the proposed (or imposed) representation and, on the other hand, people’s freedom to choose their identity according to projected benefits.

Instrumentalist and constructivist views often go together: since identities are formed, they can be used by the elite to safeguard their influence. It should, however, be clarified that though instrumentalists subscribe to constructivism, constructivists are not necessarily instrumentalists because manipulation by the elite is only one of the processes that can be used for a nation’s social construction. This could be the result of the efforts of individual agents or of economic and social processes or even of discursive practices (Fearon and Laitin 2000). At the individual level, national identity is not always a result of manipulation but can also be (re)produced by the daily actions of ordinary persons (Billig 1995). At the meta-individual level, the need for national construction might be felt after socioeconomic changes as shown by Benedict Anderson (1999), Karl Deutsch (1953) and Ernest Gellner (1983). National construction could also depend on discursive practices or symbolic and cultural systems. Brubaker and Cooper (2000: 16) observe that national identity can be the ‘anonymous’ product of a particular discursive environment that shapes our way of thinking and our understanding of the world. Consequently, even if it can be the case, the idea of construction should not be limited to actors having a conscious and clearly defined or practical desire to identify with, or manipulate, a particular category.

This leads us to a difficult question, as to identify the constructed and contingent nature of the nation does not explain its power. Why do people feel attracted to such a discourse, why do they follow nationalist movements? If we do not adhere to the two extreme hypotheses of people either being victim of manipulation or freely choosing a national or ethnic identity because they will gain from it, what is left as middle path? I argue that nationalist discourses are anchored in a certain cultural milieu that limits invention. However, this does not imply that the context is static. The elements can be rearranged, some can be emphasized and others forgotten (see Wimmer 2002: ch. 1); these elements are the building blocks (Motyl 1999), the symbolical repertoire with which people live.⁵

Nations are socially and historically constructed and contingent because the assemblage could have been done differently; which elements are chosen and how they are reformulated depends on the ‘power structure’ (Wimmer 2002: 36). To explain how nations appear and how they appeal to people, the use of verbs such as ‘to do’ and ‘to construct’ evoke conscious human agency. This way of speaking about the nation brings to mind a strong version of the instrumentalist approach of elites consciously fabricating nations. Yet, as I have argued, it might be so in some cases but nationalism cannot be reduced to elites making up a discourse and people blindly following.

Then does all that allow us to reply to the question ‘what is a nation?’ more precisely than saying that it is a social category that people take as a group because of the type of discourse uttered about it and that this discourse is inscribed in a social and cultural context? We certainly need one more step: what makes up a national narrative or, more broadly, what is the national discourse all about, and why do people relate to ‘their nation’? According to Hobsbawm, a nation is ‘any sufficiently large body of people whose members regard themselves as members of a “nation”’ (Hobsbawm 1992: 8). Yet, following Alexander J. Motyl (1999), I add that if people consider themselves to be part of a nation it implies that they hold certain propositions about ‘their nation’ to be true. According to Motyl, the necessary common propositions relate to the nation’s origins and boundaries. Moreover, in order to distinguish between nation and ethnic group, one more element is necessary when trying to keep only the skeleton of nationalist discourse: this discourse postulates congruence – either achieved or desired – between nation and a certain kind of modern territorial state (Kohl 1998: 226).

The discourse on the nation is a product of nationalism. Nationalism has been analysed as a movement (Breuilly 1996), an ideology (Freeden 1998; Sutherland 2005), a disc...

Table of contents

• Routledge advances in South Asian studies
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Nation, religion and history
• 2 Textbooks, teachers and students
• 3 The debate in context
• 4 Enemies and defenders
• 5 Perspectives and silences
• General conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index