What is it to Be ‘National’ Anymore?: Contesting Nationalist Insecurities, National Identity, Othering and Alternate Imaginations in India

South Asia has always been characterized by a strong overarching state. A post-colonial democratic India has been no different. The Indian state has been constraining the space for articulating any alternate sense of belonging. Other than that of a top-down ‘nationalist’ idea which is an inherently exclusive project since it seems to securitize and consider any other collective sensibility as a threat. It does so because of its insecurities and a lingering cartographic anxiety. Alternate imaginations can and do co-exist with the national imaginations but the Indian ‘nation-state’ has increasingly had problems with such imaginations. The paper seeks to locate and critically analyse such nationalist insecurities and the multiplicity of alternate imaginations of Pan-South Asianism, sub-nationalisms, other such regionalisms and cosmopolitanisms and their complex interactions in everyday India. Alternate imaginations have been dealt with suspicion and subsequently coercion to be set in line with the only ‘true’ larger identity which is the ‘national’ identity. The paper seeks to explore whether and how popular alternate imaginations co-exist with or contest, resist or negotiate with the ‘national’ identity. It can also not be assumed that the people are readily more cosmopolitan than to the extent that the state allows for. Therefore, it looks at how people respond to the overarching and omnipresent state and its articulation in the everyday as to whether they readily accept the ‘manufactured’ picture or they go beyond. It also explores the question of whether such articulations have a differential impact in certain sites and spatialities especially in the socio-political and geographical margins. Essentially, it asks whether alternate imaginations have to always come at the cost of the loss of nationalist imagination or does it have more to do with how that nationalist imagination gets articulated. Therefore, how nationalist allegiance gets impacted when it is articulated in an inclusive and progressive manner which can freely accommodate engagements with other sensibilities while not declaring them antithetical is analyzed. The question begs that even if such a relative decline were to come, do popular imaginations have to be necessarily constrained within the ‘container’ of the ‘national’. The national integration has always been about articulation of a ‘larger identity’ in which other identities would either wilfully come into or are able to be coerced into coming under. This idea needs to be problematized. In a multi-faceted, multi-directional, on-going and sometimes contradicting, ‘globalizing’ and ‘regionalizing’ world, can many of the post-national and even sub-national sensibilities be readily sacrificed at the altar of a constraining national identity or can engagement and resistance lead to more progressive articulations in India?