Nationalism and poverty: discourses of development and culture in 20th century India

This paper interrogates the terms ‘developmental nationalism’ and ‘cultural nationalism’ to conclude that, because developmental nationalisms always have cultural elements and cultural nationalisms, developmental ones, the precise, and varied, meanings of ‘development’ and ‘culture’ demand careful scrutiny, as do the shifting proportions of their combinations in different ideological – political formations and in the confrontations and partial accommodations between, and across, diverse nationalist traditions. The central argument is that we might get a better purchase on the developmental/cultural nationalism transition in the Indian case in juxtaposition with the problematic of poverty. Indian intellectuals turning towards self-conscious nationalism often placed the poverty of the country at the heart of their nationalism, making it basically a critique and the nation still in need of ‘making’ or constitution. The alternative has been to project the nation (or, with votaries of ‘communal’ politics—religious communities, Hindu or Muslim) as in every case an always already established glorious entity, with a resplendent history and culture, free of blemishes other than those imposed by external invasion or domination. Through four sets of case studies of these opposing traditions at four moments in the history of modern India, the focus here is on degrees of fetishisation of the nation, and their consequences in terms of the strengthening, or subversion, of hierarchies and power relations.