The Insurrection of Little Selves: The Crisis of Secular-Nationalism in India

by Aditya Nigam

The book explores the crisis that secular-nationalism went through with the emergence of what is loosely called identity politics. With the rise of new political assertions on the one hand and sectarian tendencies on the other, the fundamentally Hindu assumptions of Nehruvian
secular-nationalism were revealed. Its search for a homogeneous national culture has led it to produce the dominant culture as the norm and marginalize the minority. It also looks at the opportunism of minority cultures and suggests this might be the result of nationalism, especially post-colonial.
The book suggests that only by looking beyond the nation state can we conceive of a modern political community.

362 pages, Paperback

First published January 6, 2005

Reviews

[Debjani · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you grew up in India in the seventies and eighties and experienced that nation where democratic principles of tolerance and coexistence were the paradigm of existence, you will be lost in the India of today where polarisation, radicalisation and counter democracy are reigning principles. This was my situation when I picked up Insurrection and Nigam has taken me on a journey where I have begun to understand ways in which India, which conceived of its nationhood under colonial regime, was always going to have a fraught relationship with democracy. The two constituencies that Nigam focuses on are the Muslims and the Dalits and he does this to show that India had always marginalized some communities and this is not a contemporary phenomenon. The work on Dalit struggles is particularly valuable and Nigam points to the way in which Dalit politics embodies a serious resistance to the binaries set up by nationalism and secularism. He traces Dalit resistance through Ambedkar and Periyar to demonstrate the ways in which the subaltern location of the Dalits was incompatible with the nation-building project even at the point of India's decolonization. The conclusion of the book is extremely significant to a reader like me as he explores the secularism of the 70s and 80s through a re-evaluation of the Nehruvian legacy. Given all its pitfalls and its failure to include all the marginalised communities, secularism was yet real and not a posture, asserts Nigam. But secularism, and the liberal parliamentary democracy that it is tied to conceptually, have exposed their limitations in the recent decades. They are unable to fight mass democracy as the Ram Janmabhoomi debates and the Gujarat carnage of 2002 has shown. In looking for an emancipatory model that can work for India in place of the liberal democrat, Nigam proposes the figure of the bilingual intellectual-activist, who speaks the language of community and the civil society.