Nation And The State, The Nation-State: Liberation From Conceptual Eurocentrism

Abstract

This paper presents the complexity of the realities of the nation,
state, and nation-state in the Indian context, which resulted from the
application of the western conceptualisations of the nation and the
nation-state. In doing so the paper examines in a historical context the
western concept of the unitary nation-state. Under this form of
conceptualisation, the nation is regarded as independent of and prior
or subsequent to the state. It would mean that there can be one or more
nations within a single state. In such a conceptualisation no clear
distinction is made between ethnic group and nation, and India is not
regarded as a nation-state. However, the Indian nation was born out of
the Indian nationalism for a sovereign democratic India, which was
pluri-ethnic, multi-class, and gender partnered. Hence, the indigenous
atypical Indian nation is a creature of civic nationalism, not ethnonationalism.
The origin of the Indian nation-state is rooted in an ethnic
plurality joining in a common political cause for national liberation
and a national state, without the compulsions of ethnic homogenisation.
The western concept of the mono-cultural nation does not fully explain
this reality of the Indian nation-state. The Indian experiment gives social
science the scope for liberating the concept of the nation from western
parochialism and makes it universal.