Playing the Nation Game: The Ambiguities of Nationalism in India

In his significant new work, Playing the Nation Game, Bejamin Zachariah examines the tension between the ‘nation’ idea as a necessary language of legitimacy with which to claim liberation, and its role in disciplining people and their identities in India in the name of national liberation. Focussing on the anti-colonial struggle and the subsequent ‘Nehruvian’ period, and necessarily on histories of interconnected and travelling ideas, it seeks to show the ambiguities, exclusions and consequent dangers of nationalism, and the ways in which scholarship and politics conspire to reify nationalist frameworks. It explodes spurious claims to ‘indigenous traditions,’ and argues for a consistent separation of the categories ‘state’ and ‘nation’.