Breaking down the question
The question has two joints. First, the conceptual relationship between ethnicity and nationalism — how a sense of shared descent, language, religion or culture connects to the claim to nationhood and, potentially, to a state. Second, the Indian application — the emergence of ethnonationalism, that is, movements that fuse an ethnic identity with a nationalist demand for autonomy, statehood or secession within the Indian union.
The examiner is asking you to move from theory to context. You must first establish that ethnicity and nationalism are analytically distinct but historically entangled — nationalism often mobilises ethnic markers, and ethnicity becomes politically potent when it takes a national form. Then you must show how, in India's plural society, particular ethnic identities have been transformed into sub-national or ethnonational assertions, and why. A strong answer combines a clear theoretical frame with concrete Indian illustration and a sociological explanation of causes.
How to approach it
Begin by defining the two terms. Ethnicity is a sense of collective belonging based on presumed common ancestry and shared cultural markers — language, religion, region, custom. Nationalism is a political principle holding that a people so defined should have political self-determination, ideally its own state. Draw the link: nationalism frequently draws on ethnic raw material, and Benedict Anderson's imagined community shows how such solidarities are constructed rather than primordial.
Then define ethnonationalism as the politicisation of ethnicity into a demand for national self-determination, and explain its emergence in India through uneven development, the reorganisation of states on linguistic lines, competition over resources and jobs, perceived cultural threat, and elite mobilisation. Illustrate with the linguistic movements, and with regional and border assertions such as those in the North-East, Punjab and the Kashmir valley, without endorsing any position. Use Paul Brass on the instrumental construction of ethnic identity and T. K. Oommen on nation, ethnicity and the Indian state. Our notes on the problems of religious minorities supply related material. Conclude with a balanced view of ethnonationalism as both a challenge to, and a product of, the nation-building process.
Model answer
Ethnicity and nationalism are distinct concepts that repeatedly converge. Ethnicity refers to a sense of collective identity grounded in a belief in common ancestry and expressed through shared cultural markers — language, religion, region, dress, custom and historical memory. Nationalism is a political doctrine which holds that such a community constitutes a nation and is therefore entitled to political self-determination, ideally in the form of its own state. The one is primarily a mode of belonging; the other is a claim to power. Their relationship is intimate because nationalism almost always mobilises ethnic material: it takes the raw sense of cultural kinship and forges it into a political project.
Modern scholarship stresses that neither is simply given by nature. Benedict Anderson's account of the nation as an imagined community shows how print, language and shared symbols allow large populations who will never meet to conceive of themselves as one people. Ethnic identities too are constructed and reconstructed; they are activated, boundaries redrawn, and traditions reinvented in the course of political competition. Ethnicity, in other words, becomes nationalism when a cultural group comes to see itself as a nation and demands autonomy or statehood on that basis. This fusion is what we call ethnonationalism.
In India, a society of extraordinary linguistic, religious, regional and tribal diversity, ethnonationalism has been a recurrent feature of the post-colonial experience. The Indian nationalism that won independence was a broadly civic and composite nationalism, seeking to accommodate plurality within a single state. But the very process of building that state activated ethnic assertions. The reorganisation of provinces on linguistic lines in 1956 both recognised and institutionalised linguistic identity as a basis of political community, and language movements demonstrated how a cultural marker could become a mobilising national sentiment. Regional and border movements have gone further, articulating demands ranging from greater autonomy to statehood to, in some cases, secession — for instance in parts of the North-East, in Punjab during the 1980s, and in the Kashmir valley. In each, an ethnic identity defined by language, religion, tribe or region has been recast as a national identity at odds with, or seeking recognition within, the Indian union.
Why does ethnicity take this ethnonational turn? Several sociological factors converge. Uneven development leaves some regions feeling exploited or neglected, so that economic grievance is expressed in the idiom of cultural distinctiveness. Competition over scarce resources — jobs, land, admissions, political office — sharpens group boundaries and gives ethnic solidarity a material stake, a dynamic Paul Brass analysed as the instrumental construction of ethnic identity by competing elites. Perceived threats to language, religion or demographic dominance, whether from migration or from a centralising state, generate defensive mobilisation. And political entrepreneurs find in ethnic sentiment a ready resource for building constituencies. T. K. Oommen has explored how the Indian state's own categories and policies mediate the relationship between nation, ethnicity and citizenship, so that ethnonationalism emerges partly as a response to the practices of nation-building itself.
The relationship, then, runs in both directions. Ethnonationalism challenges the unity of the nation-state, but it is also very often a product of that state's own processes — its administrative categories, its distribution of resources, its recognition of some identities and not others. It need not always be secessionist; much of it is a demand for fuller inclusion, recognition and a fairer share, and the Indian polity has frequently accommodated such demands through the creation of new states, autonomous councils and constitutional protections for language and culture. Where accommodation has failed or been perceived as coercive, ethnonational assertion has hardened into conflict.
In conclusion, ethnicity and nationalism are joined by the process through which cultural belonging becomes a claim to political self-determination. In India, a plural society engaged in an ongoing project of nation-building, ethnonationalism is neither a mere pathology nor an alien intrusion but an intrinsic tension of that project — at once a challenge to the state and a reflection of how the state itself shapes the identities of its people.
Examiner's perspective
The examiner wants both halves of the question answered and joined. A common weakness is to write a generic essay on ethnicity or on nationalism without linking them, or to narrate Indian movements without any conceptual frame. The pivot of a good answer is the demonstration that ethnicity becomes ethnonationalism when a cultural group reimagines itself as a nation and demands self-determination.
Strong scripts define the terms crisply, use Anderson to establish the constructed character of national community and Brass to explain the instrumental mobilisation of ethnicity, and then ground the argument in specific Indian instances handled with sociological detachment rather than political advocacy. The highest band goes to candidates who explain the causes — uneven development, resource competition, cultural threat, elite mobilisation and the state's own categories — and who recognise, with Oommen, that ethnonationalism is as much a by-product of nation-building as a revolt against it. Analytical balance and restraint on sensitive cases are essential.