Description
Book SynopsisExplores how nationalists are turned into nationals, the colonial state into a sovereign nation-state, and subjects into citizens. The author considers several ways that identification with the nation-state was produced and consolidated during the 1950s and 1960s.
Trade Review“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
“This book marks a departure in the study of Indian nationalism. Srirupa Roy’s idea that nationalism works not as a ‘belief’ but through practices that seek to ground the state deeply in the life of the people, is demonstrated here by archival and ethnographic explorations of specific sites: rituals and pageantry of the state, official newsreels and documentaries, planned scientific institutions and industrial cities. The result is fine-grained political analysis enriched at every turn by the author’s judicious use of history and ethnography.”—Dipesh Chakrabarty, author of
Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies“Srirupa Roy . . . has written an engaging and incisive study of the nation-building project in India. . . . Roy’s book is a welcome and original investigation into the origin and means of the national imagination of India.” -- Simona Vittorini * Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism *
“Srirupa Roy’s
Beyond Belief is a superb contribution to the study of postcolonial nationalism and the complex lives of the postcolonial Indian nation-state. . . . [T]he book is an excellent and invaluable addition to the literature on Indian nationalism and the Indian nation-state as well as an important contribution to theories of nationalism, the state, and nation-state, and postcolonial studies. Lucid and concise, the book is extremely well written. Different methodological and disciplinary perspectives are employed in the text with rigor and carefulness to enrich one another.” -- Rohit Chopra * H-Nationalism, H-Net Reviews *
Table of ContentsPreface and Acknowledgments vii
Introduction. Imagining Institutions, Instituting Diversity: Toward a Theory of Nation-State Formation 1
1. Moving Pictures: The Films Division of India and the Visual Practices of the Nation-State 32
2. Marching in Time: Republic Day Parades and the Ritual Practices of the Nation-State 66
3. Indian Darkness: Science, Development, and the Needs Discourse of the Nation-State 105
4. Cities of Hope: Steel Townships and the Spatial Practices of the Nation-State 133
Conclusion. After Midnight 157
Notes 171
Bibliography 219
Index 237
