The Romance of the State: And the Fate of Dissent in the TropicsThe essays in this volume written as part of psychological biography of the Indian state, explore the scope, limits, and fate of some key concepts in the mainstream culture of politics that have come to structure India's public life. These concepts constitute the dominant public ideology within the consciousness of the expanding middle classes in the country and they range from concrete concerns like 'secularism' and 'development' to more abstract ones such as 'dissent' and 'history'. The essays, mostly inquire into the culture of the Indian state, suggest tangentially the directions in which to move for a cultural and psychological biography of the state. The idea of a moderate state, which was of a state that was neither over-burdened with the responsibility of engineering all aspects of its citizens' lives nor of seeking to extend the market and global capital into every corner of every society, was not unknown to all societies at all times. While such moderate states may not have been great successes and may not have survived, neither can the modern nation-state system claim to be the greatest success story of all times. The question of its survival as an arrangement of political communities, too, remains to be finally decided. The essays in this book explore the vicissitudes of the idea of the modern state under different cultural and psychological conditions. |
Contents
The Fate of a Concept | 1 |
Culture State and the Rediscovery of Indian Politics | 15 |
PART | 34 |
Copyright | |
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activists Ashis Nandy Asia authoritarianism awareness Ayodhya Babri mosque become believe Bengali Bhattacharjee Calcutta citizens civilization colonial communities concept construction creative criticism critique culture culture of India Damodar dams decultured Delhi democracy democratic Development and Violence displaced dissent dominant economic élite Essays ethnic Europe European faith forms future Gandhi global Hindu nationalism Hindu nationalists Hinduism Hindutva historians human idea ideology of secularism Indian politics instance intellectual internal Islam Kapil knowledge language less living majority meaning middle-class modern Indians modern nation-state modern science moral movement Muslim myths nation-state nation-state system nineteenth century nonmodern organized Oxford University Press Pakistan past pathologies person psychological Punjab regime religion religious response riots sector secularism secularists sense Sikhs Singh social society South Asian statecraft survival terrorism Terrorism in India terrorists theory Third World tolerance traditional uprooted urban V.D. Savarkar victims vision West western worldview zealot