Beyond Belief: India and the Politics of Postcolonial Nationalism (Politics, History, and Culture) - Softcover

Roy, Srirupa

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822340011 ISBN 13: 9780822340010

Publisher: Duke University Press Books, 2007

Synopsis

Beyond Belief is a bold rethinking of the formation and consolidation of nation-state ideologies. Analyzing India during the first two decades following its foundation as a sovereign nation-state in 1947, Srirupa Roy explores how nationalists are turned into nationals, subjects into citizens, and the colonial state into a sovereign nation-state. Roy argues that the postcolonial nation-state is consolidated not, as many have asserted, by efforts to imagine a shared cultural community, but rather by the production of a recognizable and authoritative identity for the state. This project—of making the state the entity identified as the nation’s authoritative representative—emphasizes the natural cultural diversity of the nation and upholds the state as the sole unifier or manager of the “naturally” fragmented nation; the state is unified through diversity.

Roy considers several different ways that identification with the Indian nation-state was produced and consolidated during the 1950s and 1960s. She looks at how the Films Division of India, a state-owned documentary and newsreel production agency, allowed national audiences to “see the state”; how the “unity in diversity” formation of nationhood was reinforced in commemorations of India’s annual Republic Day; and how the government produced a policy discourse claiming that scientific development was the ultimate national need and the most pressing priority for the state to address. She also analyzes the fate of the steel towns—industrial townships built to house the workers of nationalized steel plants—which were upheld as the exemplary national spaces of the new India. By prioritizing the role of actual manifestations of and encounters with the state, Roy moves beyond theories of nationalism and state formation based on collective belief.

About this title

From the Publisher:

"A richly textured, beautifully written, and provocatively argued analysis of the Japanese folk-craft movement, this study sheds light on empire, middle-class material culture, the aesthetics of fascism, and much else common to twentieth-century societies in the throes of dislocating change. A beguiling book on important themes."--Carol Gluck, George Sansom Professor of History, Columbia University

"Kingdom of Beauty is first-rate. Kim Brandt's analysis is sharp, her organization supple, her writing graceful. Moreover, her synthesis of the imperial with the domestic--and of the ideological with the material--makes the book a model of cultural history."--Kären Wigen, author of The Making of a Japanese Periphery, 1750-1920

From the Back Cover:

"Srirupa Roy offers fresh, innovative, and highly original perspectives on how the Indian nation-state set out to manufacture a national modernity and new ways of presenting itself. This is a much needed contribution to a critical assessment of the now quasi-mythical Nehruvian decades of postcolonial state formation from one of the best political scientists writing on India today."--Thomas Blom Hansen, University of Amsterdam

About this edition

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0822340011
• ISBN 13: 9780822340010
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 264