De-familiarising Nationalist Discourses: Performative Ironies of the Normative Indian Episteme
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.31436/asiatic.v8i2.496Abstract
The present excursus attempts a deconstructive reading of the foundational texts of normative Indian nationalism and problematises them and their epistemic plexus through the critical trajectories of Homi K. Bhabha and Partha Chatterjee. Nationalism still remains a primary signifier in academic debates and in works like The Nation and its Fragments and Nationalist Thoughts and the Colonial World, Chatterjee challenges the assumption that nationalism in Asia and Africa is a derivative version of pre-given European nationalist a prioris. For Chatterjee, Asian and African nationalism was based on difference and not on derivation and the present essay addresses this differentiality, this dynamics of performative operativity of Indian nationalism with specific references to textual episteme of foundational thinkers such as Tagore, Gandhi, Vivekananda and Jawaharlal Nehru. We interrogate the normative cognitivities of these foundational thinkers by pitting them against the radical conceptualisation of DissemiNation of Homi K. Bhabha. We argue that while the foundational texts of Indian nationalism did not imitate the epistemic structures of the West they ended up in offering only mythic abstractions and religious normativities that surely fail to betray any proud deliberative encounter with “the historic and objective realities†of India.Downloads
Download data is not yet available.
Downloads
Published
2014-12-15
How to Cite
Das, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, India, S. S., Purakayastha, Kazi Nazul University, India, A. S., & Sarkar, Vellore Institute of Technology, India, S. (2014). De-familiarising Nationalist Discourses: Performative Ironies of the Normative Indian Episteme. Asiatic: IIUM Journal of English Language and Literature, 8(2), 176–194. https://doi.org/10.31436/asiatic.v8i2.496
Issue
Section
General Articles
License
Copyrights of all materials published in Asiatic are held exclusively by the Journal and the respective author/s. Any reproduction of material from the journal without proper acknowledgement or prior permission will result in the infringement of intellectual property laws.