National Identities

Nehru and National Imagination

Concept Note

Jawaharlal Nehru (1889-1964) has been widely read as a political actor in various forms throughout his long association with the independence movement, as a senior functionary of the Congress, and as the first prime minister of Independent India in 1947. It appears there is a categorical division between political actors and political thinkers regarding Nehru. There is also a need to clarify the conflated study of Nehru as both a political actor and a political thinker. This is also important for understanding the temporality of Nehru, both as an actor and in relation to his ideas. The international scenario was rife with world wars and colonialism. The domestic scenarios were both in search of struggle and of alternatives. The temporality of the international and national scenarios had impacted Nehru both as an actor and a theorist. 

A combination of Nehru, both as a political actor and theoretician, takes place in certain formulations. Attention has been paid to his association with freedom struggles and, as the Prime Minister of India, to a person who engaged profusely in national and international causes, thus offering his normative philosophy. His theoretical engagement, or otherwise, offers a confluence of national concerns and international developments. This is peculiar for a theorist cum political actor from a colonial/post-colonial country to offer the position through the confluence of national concern and intentional developments. This confluence generates his notion of national imagination.

His notion of national imagination is not purely local or wholly universal. He offers a certain confluence of national imagination that seems to divide both admirers and critics. The admirers find his national imagination a unique contribution for intertwining national and international domains, in which nations are linked to secularism, socialism, a secular state, a non-aligned world order, modernity, science, technology, modernisation, industrialisation, democracy, and rights. His postcolonial critiques and communitarian critique remain unpersuasive of such borrowing due to the non-tenability of mega projects, either industrial or state-led, due to the inherent nature of alienness from postcolonial society and the inherent presence of violence in such projects or, at best, the passive revolution.

The special issue seeks to invite intervention in this way. Since there is an agreement that the confluence of the national and the international is writ large in Nehru, can it be called borrowing, a derivative, or an epiphenomenon? Nehru forms a national imagination in which each component (secularism, socialism, a secular state, a non-aligned world order, modernity, science, technology, modernisation, industrialisation, democracy, and rights) is mediated by both the temporalities of the national and the international.   This generated the following questions:

1. How does Nehru, as a theorist, propose national imagination?
2. What is the role of Nehru as a political actor in the pursuit of national imagination?
3. What is the nature of mediated components of national imagination? In other words, what has been the nature of certain components, like secularism, socialism, or modernity, and so on, in Nehru's post-confluence of national and international dimensions? 
4. How has Nehru been instrumental in shaping universalism as contextual and contextual as universal vis-à-vis the component of national imagination?

Tentative Themes (but not limited to):

• Nehru and National Imagination: Nature, Confluence and Question of Derivation
• Nehru and National Imagination: Epistemological Sources (Traditions, Modernity, Science, Technology, East and West; Global South);
• National Imagination and Question of ‘Social’: Caste, Tribes, Gender, Minorities
• National Imagination and Political Values – Secularism, Democracy, Socialism, Scientific Temper
• National Imagination, State and Political Economy – Institutions, Planning, Modernization, Mixed Economy
• Debates in Political Imagination: Gandhi, Nehru, Ambedkar, Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, Aruna Asaf Ali
• Nehru, Political Imagination and Contemporary Contestation: Religion, Environment, Violence, Urban-Rural, Education, and Movements.
• Nehru, National Imagination, and Internationalism: Understanding the internationalism such as Bandung and NAM and so on.