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Chapter III: Nation Building I. Introduction The third chapter is about 'Nation building', which refers to the consolidation phase of nationalism with the congruence of nation and state. It has been argued in Chapter I that 'nation' is forever configured, the identity codes bearing its name never stabilised. If 'nation formation' is a movement/moment of figuration, then 'nation building' refers to the processes of reconfiguration. Both phases involve construction, revision, contestation and negotiation over the discursive field of 'nation'. This phase is marked by the generation of consent toward the hegemonic construction of nation, regulation of the 'national', and institutionalisation of mechanisms of exclusion and control. The hegemonic nationalism so as to sustain and entrench its domination negotiates, undermines, short circuits and appropriates the space of the state. In the context of India, the hegemonic orthodoxy has effectively established its own mechanism of power that, while influencing the state functions, also reserves the initiative to control identitarian practices. The hegemonic discourses of the upper classes/castes structure nationalism, which prescribe and proscribe identities, monopolising the definition of subjectivity, modernity and cultural self-representation. The argument here is that in India, the point of permeation of power is not always and decidedly the state but the hegemonic socio-cultural power of orthodoxy. Rudolph and Rudolph, describing Indian politics, identify this and characterise it as the tussle between 'demand polity' (societal pressure) and 'command polity' (state control)'. This indicates that the congruence of nation and state is incomplete. The socio-cultural power often is in alliance with the state and sometimes in defiance of the state. There are many accounts of how in modem societies state is the major arbiter of power. State is seen to be the juncture of the dispersal of power under modernity. Nation-state, it is argued, typically is the point of concentration of totalised power. 189 In India the situation is conspicuously different. The struggles against power are aimed in many people's movements at an entity other than the state: a socio-cultural power in the form of orthodoxy. If we look at the post- independence period in India, most of the long time struggles have been against the orthodoxy or the various forms of its operation. Such struggles would include feminist and anti-caste movements. In many cases state is seen as an ally of the strugglers, as an institution that may intervene on behalf of them. This suggests that state in India is not yet, not wholly, in a position of subject constituting. That power, it seems, still belongs to the socio-cultural community, the orthodoxy, with its past and present theories of knowledge, of being and doing, of socialising and of identity. In other words, practices of socialising and modes of individualising are powers that orthodox socio- cultural power carries out.^ Often, the struggles aimed at the state target the collusion between the state and the cultural power. In this connection Romila Thapar's proposition is puzzling, when she says: Perhaps the state has to be reminded of its function as a mechanism for improving conditions, from which function it has been withdrawing. This might best be achieved by a more articulate and effective intervention of civil society to control the possible excesses of the state, to prevent a stranglehold by particular interests and ensure that the activity of the state effectively narrows the disparities."* Making the civil society the agency for negotiating with the state for narrowing the disparities involves a contradiction, considering the 'civil society' itself is structured in the Indian society in communitarian axis. In fact it is the stranglehold of the community-based civil society over the state and its control over the functioning of the state that need to be altered. Hence, state is not the central agent of hegemonisation. It exists in an ambivalent condition: as a rational institution, state, in India, acts as the power commanding the allegiance of the subjects; but it is compromised as its powers are assumed and disbursed by the cultural power of orthodoxy, undermined by the diverse demand groups.^ In the context of identity politics it is the cultural 190 power that comes to configure and negotiate the construction of 'nation'. Thus, beyond the political domain, state is less a source of the hegemonisation than a means through which contestations are acted out. Theorising the notion of political society as distinct from civil society, Partha Chatterjee has observed: Civil society, restricted to a small section of culturally equipped citizens, represents in countries like India the high ground of modernity. So does the constitutional model of the state. But in actual practice, governmental agencies must descend from that high ground to the terrain of political society in order to renew their legitimacy.. ."^ Partha Chatterjee's term 'civil society' comes close to the term cultural orthodoxy employed here. That this 'civil society' is not structured as a representative of the larger body of society, termed by him 'political society', is the significant point. In this section the attempt is to examine the ways in which the processes of nation-building in relation to the notion of nation are set to work. The processes of nation-building would differ from the earlier movement of nation- formation, discussed in the previous chapter, in so far as the focus now is more on consolidation of the hegemony established and the contestation is in relation to upstaging or seriously revising the established hegemonic notion of nation. The role of the state and that of the various socialities - civil, political, ethnic, etc. - would need to be examined in order to bring out how the concept of nation is in the process of continuous configuration and contestation. The discourses of the state, of the various socialities, are to be viewed in order to analyse the prescriptive form of national identity, the marking of national interest and the activities of the people vis-a-vis the space of the state functions. One has to examine the centrality that state comes to assume in the affairs of the people, deciding their attitudes towards self and sociality, development and change, values of public good and the parameters of the 'public' itself in the Indian Republic. At the same time, the constraint under which state articulates its subject constituting power also has to be examined. The structure of power that regulates the identity politics needs to be studied to 191 understand how state itself comes to be channelised, by passed, subverted, and undermined in the 'staging of nation'. In studying novels in relation to 'nation building' one has to look at what kind of social concerns - evils, problems, progress, etc. - are thematised; what interests are projected as constituting or having a bearing on the nation; what values and practices are subjected to erasure; and what kind of rearranging of nostalgia is undertaken. Novels need to be examined both to understand the nation concept and to unravel the 'outside' of such a 'nation' implied within them. In this examination, one has to attend to the privileged constructions of identity in relation to gender, caste, religion, class, sexuality, region and other such identity interests. State is often seen as the major arbitrator of public good and public interest. But the space of the state itself - in terms of its function, responsibility, policies, players, representation of the state and so on - is an issue of contestation. Akhil Gupta develops a well argued case for understanding state as produced performatively by people in contingent situations: At the local level, it becomes difficult to experience the state as an ontically coherent entity: what one confronts instead is much more discrete and fragmentary... it is precisely through the practices of such local institutions that a translocal institution such as the state comes to be imagined. One may also notice that in India a number of things are done, not within the modalities framed by the state, but through network stimulation. These networks could be based on kinship, community, caste, religion, profession, region and other civil-social bonds. Thus, in the public arena, especially when it comes to state-citizen relationship, we notice the operation of a discourse of 'connection'. That this is not merely a case of corruption in the bureaucracy is suggested by the fact that connections are also crucially employed in negotiating with private bodies such as educational institutions, civil forums, private sector employers, etc. 192 It may be noticed that the hegemonic construction of nation pre­ occupies the state and its discourses which comes to be expressed in the pohcies and programmes of the state. These normally are aimed at entrenching the interests of the hegemonic identity groups. At the same time, attempts to revise the 'nation', to redefine it, are still underway and contenting nationalisms continue to try to make inroads into the hegemonic space. Disenchantment is not a strange motif in a work of the post- independence era, especially in the 60's and 70's. This is a period in India when in most Indian language literatures 'modernist' works made their presence felt. Risking generalisation, one may venture to say that along with such tropes as alienation, angst, etc. the literature of this period in most Indian literary traditions gave vent to disillusionment and a strong anti-romantic feeling. In Indian English literature too this is the period when, in poetry as well as fiction, a general sense of dissatisfaction and refusal to follow idealism were commonly seen. Fredric Jameson's formulation that in the third world novels, narrating a story becomes narrating the nation itself has been hotly debated^. On the face of it this generalisation does appear reductive as it seems to consider the individual as a microcosm of the collective, the local as the seed of the national.

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