Nationalism is the claim that humanity is properly divided into nations, that each nation possesses a distinct character and history, and that political authority should coincide with national community. It is at once a doctrine, a sentiment of belonging and a mobilising movement — which is why the same word covers anti-colonial liberation and majoritarian exclusion.
Points of debate
Three accounts compete. Primordialists treat nations as ancient, resting on shared blood, language or territory. Modernists such as Gellner argue that nations are products of industrialisation and the state's need for a mobile, literate, culturally standardised population — nationalism creates nations, not the reverse. Constructivists follow Anderson's Imagined Communities: the nation is an imagined political community, imagined as both limited and sovereign, made thinkable by print capitalism, vernacular newspapers and novels which let strangers picture themselves moving through the same time. Hobsbawm's invented traditions and Barth's work on how ethnic boundaries are maintained extend the same insight.
How it works
A standard distinction separates civic nationalism, where membership rests on shared citizenship, law and territory, from ethnic nationalism, where it rests on descent, language or religion. In practice most nationalisms mix the two, and the boundary shifts with political need. Nationalism is transmitted through schooling, census categories, national holidays, sport, monuments and language policy.
Why it matters
Indian nationalism developed as an anti-colonial movement that had to hold together enormous linguistic, religious and caste diversity, and its dominant strand was therefore composite and territorial rather than ethnic — expressed in the Constitution's secular citizenship and in Nehru's account of a plural civilisation. Yet rival claims coexisted with it: religious nationalisms culminating in Partition, linguistic movements that reshaped state boundaries, Ambedkar's insistence that a nation could not be built while caste hierarchy survived, and Chatterjee's argument that the anti-colonial nation was first imagined in an inner cultural domain. Contemporary debates over citizenship registers show the civic-ethnic tension is unsettled.
For the UPSC answer
Answer through the three theoretical positions, giving Anderson the most weight since examiners look for the imagined community. Then apply the civic-ethnic distinction to India, using Partition, linguistic reorganisation and citizenship debates as evidence that Indian nationalism is a contested field rather than a single doctrine.
References & further reading
- Anderson, B. (1983). Imagined Communities. Verso.
- Gellner, E. (1983). Nations and Nationalism. Blackwell.
- Chatterjee, P. (1993). The Nation and Its Fragments. Princeton University Press.