Conjuring the nation-state: the vicissitudes of ‘life’ in The Discovery of India1

1. Without the critical and incisive comments of Priya Kumar and Claire Fox, this essay would never have taken the form it eventually did. I also thank the two anonymous readers at Postcolonial Studies, Young Cheon Cho, Alessandra Madella, Sangeet Kumar and especially Ben Basan, for their comments and critiques of the draft. Suvadip Sinha suggested that I read Pheng Cheah's Spectral Nationality to explore the significance of the philosopheme of ‘life’—my thanks to him. Last but not least, this essay is my token of appreciation to my parents and Andreea for their love and support.

Abstract

Jawaharlal Nehru's The Discovery of India is one of the most well known and widely discussed examples of the ‘national narrative’ in the Indian context. However, most critics tend to ignore the fascinating complexities of The Discovery of India’s narrative when it is invoked in a discussion on the trajectory of the Indian nation-state since 1947. The text is utilized instead as a means for accessing the univocal authorial persona of ‘Nehru’, who then becomes a marker for evaluating the success or failure of the Indian nation-state since independence. A parallel tendency is that most of these critics, whether detractors or defenders of Nehru, place far too much attention on the Nehruvian idea of the state, and tend to ignore or pay cursory attention to the project of national ‘self-making’ in the text. My essay eschews the temptation to make the persona of Nehru or his views on the state its primary focus, and brings attention back to the complex narrative strands of The Discovery of India. In contrast to many commentators on the text who claim that it is inelegant, loose and unstructured, I argue that there is a thread that we can follow consistently in the narrative, provided by the repeated use of the concept-metaphor of ‘life’. Utilizing the work of Pheng Cheah, I consider how the philosopheme of ‘life’ became an important component of modern discourses of nationalism, and the manner in which the echo of this trope resonates in a classic nationalist text produced from the colonial domain such as The Discovery of India. I further argue that the structural deployment of ‘life’ in the text enables Nehru to re-inspirit the moribund nation-form with the vitality of ‘youth’, thereby staving off forms of death brought about by the parasitical prosthesis of colonial rule. However, even though ‘life’ binds a large portion of the text together and is utilized to exorcise forms of death that colonial rule engenders, it encounters a major roadblock in the interstitial, liminal figure of the ‘undead’—the not quite living, and the not yet dead. In my reading, the figure of the Muslim is the most visible exemplar of the ‘undead’ in Nehru's narrative. The figure of the undead ruffles the text-ure of The Discovery of India, rupturing the plenitude and fullness of the nation's spatio-temporal modality that ‘life’ continually seeks to construct. It also propels the emancipatory claims made on behalf of the imagined national community into the domain of the ‘inhuman technic’ of the state. The non-synchronicity in this attempted identity of the nation and the state is the fundamental tension in Nehru's narrative, the spectres of which haunt the South Asian subcontinent to the present day.

Notes

1. Without the critical and incisive comments of Priya Kumar and Claire Fox, this essay would never have taken the form it eventually did. I also thank the two anonymous readers at Postcolonial Studies, Young Cheon Cho, Alessandra Madella, Sangeet Kumar and especially Ben Basan, for their comments and critiques of the draft. Suvadip Sinha suggested that I read Pheng Cheah's Spectral Nationality to explore the significance of the philosopheme of ‘life’—my thanks to him. Last but not least, this essay is my token of appreciation to my parents and Andreea for their love and support.

2. Jawaharlal Nehru, The Discovery of India, New Delhi: Penguin, 2004.

3. An exception is Aamir Mufti, ‘Secularism and Minority: Elements of a Critique’, Social Text 45, 1995, pp 75–96.

4. Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse?, in The Partha Chatterjee Omnibus, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999, p 51.

5. Sunil Khilnani, The Idea of India, New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2004. Khilnani considers the question of Discovery's narrative briefly in his entry ‘Gandhi and Nehru: The Uses of English’, in A K Mehrotra (ed), A History of Indian Literature in English, London: Hurst and Company, 2003, pp 135–156.

6. C L R James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, New York: Vintage Books, 1963, p x.

7. Pheng Cheah, Spectral Nationality: Passages of Freedom from Kant to Postcolonial Literatures of Liberation, New York: Columbia University Press, 2003, p 98.

8. Dilip Gaonkar, ‘On Alternative Modernities’, in Dilip Gaonkar (ed), Alternative Modernities, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001, p 3.

9. For ‘undead’ see Harry D Harootunian, ‘Ghostly Comparisons: Anderson's Telescope’, in Pheng Cheah and Jonathan Culler (eds), Grounds of Comparison: Around the Work of Benedict Anderson, New York: Routledge, 2003, pp 171–198, p 188.

10. Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, Peggy Kamuf (trans), New York: Routledge, 2006, p 63.

11. Derrida, Spectres of Marx, p 202.

12. Discovery, p 532.

13. Cited in Aamir Mufti, Enlightenment in the Colony: The Jewish Question and the Crisis of Postcolonial Culture, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007, p 130.

14. Chatterjee, however, does not elaborate on these ‘contradictions’.

15. Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought, p 132.

16. Discovery, p xiv.

17. See Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories, in The Partha Chatterjee Omnibus, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999.

18. Michel de Certeau, Heterologies: Discourse on the Other, Brian Massumi (trans), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989, p 18.

19. Discovery, p 25.

20. Mufti characterizes Discovery as part ‘[...] historical interpretation, part autobiography, part prison diary, part allegory, and part polemic ...’, in Enlightenment, p 129.

21. My attempt at contending with Discovery's generical complexities is indebted to the discussions geared around a similar problematic in Amitav Ghosh's In an Antique Land. See especially the essay by Christi Merrill, ‘Laughing out of Place: Humour Alliances and Other Postcolonial Transactions in In an Antique Land’, Interventions 9(1), 2007, pp 106–123. I borrow the term ‘literary non-fiction’ from Merrill.

22. Mufti, Enlightenment, p 130.

23. Discovery, pp 26, 33, 34.

24. Discovery, p 1.

25. An instance in the text of how a term used earlier to signify historical processes is mirrored in terms of material activity.

26. Discovery, pp 22–25.

27. Discovery, p 25.

28. Discovery, p 393.

29. Chatterjee notices this moment where Nehru mentions psychoanalysis in Nationalist Thought, p 151. However, he juxtaposes this use of psychoanalysis (limited to Discovery) with another term, ‘magic’, which Nehru uses to explain Gandhi's impact in his autobiography.

30. De Certeau, Heterologies, p 4.

31. For ‘imagined-into-reality’, see Partha Chatterjee, ‘Preface to the Omnibus Edition’, in The Partha Chatterjee Omnibus, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999, p vi.

32. Discovery, p 624.

33. Cf. Nationalist Thought, p 37—‘In this new nationalist reinterpretation of the colonial impact [...] (every) civilization [...] is explained by a set of conjunctural factors: economic, political, intellectual, whatever.’

34. Discovery, p 7.

35. Cheah, Spectral, pp 28–29.

36. Cheah, Spectral, p 25.

37. Cheah, Spectral, pp 34–37.

38. Manu Goswami demonstrates that the work of Tagore, B C Pal and Rudrangshu Mukherjee provided an intellectual structure for the appropriation of Enlightenment concepts within a local frame which was later put to radical use by Gandhi and Nehru. See her essay ‘Autonomy and Comparability: Notes on the Anticolonial and the Postcolonial’, boundary 2 32(2), 2005, pp 201–225, p 216.

39. Cheah, Spectral, p 4.

40. See Manu Goswami, Producing India: From Colonial Economy to National Space, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004, p 15.

41. Discovery, pp 562–563.

42. Discovery, pp 565, 156, 96.

43. Discovery, pp 312, 340, 328.

44. Discovery, pp 96, 45, 576, emendations mine.

45. Discovery, pp 576–578.

46. Cheah, Spectral, p 39.

47. Nehru, Discovery, pp 156–157.

48. Mufti, ‘Secularism and Minority’, p 84.

49. Nehru, Discovery, p 17.

50. Mufti, ‘Secularism and Minority’, p 85.

51. Derrida, Spectres of Marx, p 15.

52. See Thongchai Winichakul, Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1994.

53. Discovery, pp 51, 17, 72, emendations mine.

54. Discovery, p 501.

55. Discovery, pp 221–222.

56. Cited in Goswami, Producing India, p 183.

57. Discovery, pp 260–261.

58. Goswami, Producing India, p 183.

59. Nehru says that it is ‘incorrect and undesirable to use “Hindu” or “Hinduism” for Indian culture, even with reference to the distant past, although the various aspects of thought […] were the dominant expression of that culture’—Discovery, p 71.

60. Mufti, Enlightenment, p 134.

61. Discovery, pp 254, 284.

62. Discovery, pp 278, 243, 250, 188, 285, 291.

63. Discovery, pp 375, 385, 377.

64. Discovery, pp 427, 429.

65. Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments, pp 110–113.

66. Benedict Anderson, ‘Introduction’, in Gopal Balakrishnan (ed), Mapping the Nation, London: Verso, 1996, pp 1–16, p 8.