Conjuring the nation-state: the vicissitudes of 'life' in The Discovery of India

摘要

Jawaharlal Nehru's The Discovery of India is one of the most well known and widely discussed examples of the 'national narrative' in the Indian context. However, most critics tend to ignore the fascinating complexities of The Discovery of India's narrative when it is invoked in a discussion on the trajectory of the Indian nation-state since 1947. The text is utilized instead as a means for accessing the univocal authorial persona of 'Nehru', who then becomes a marker for evaluating the success or failure of the Indian nation-state since independence. A parallel tendency is that most of these critics, whether detractors or defenders of Nehru, place far too much attention on the Nehruvian idea of the state, and tend to ignore or pay cursory attention to the project of national 'self-making' in the text. My essay eschews the temptation to make the persona of Nehru or his views on the state its primary focus, and brings attention back to the complex narrative strands of The Discovery of India. In contrast to many commentators on the text who claim that it is inelegant, loose and unstructured, I argue that there is a thread that we can follow consistently in the narrative, provided by the repeated use of the concept-metaphor of 'life'. Utilizing the work of Pheng Cheah, I consider how the philosopheme of 'life' became an important component of modern discourses of nationalism, and the manner in which the echo of this trope resonates in a classic nationalist text produced from the colonial domain such as The Discovery of India. I further argue that the structural deployment of 'life' in the text enables Nehru to re-inspirit the moribund nation-form with the vitality of 'youth', thereby staving off forms of death brought about by the parasitical prosthesis of colonial rule. However, even though 'life' binds a large portion of the text together and is utilized to exorcise forms of death that colonial rule engenders, it encounters a major roadblock in the interstitial, liminal figure of the 'undead'—the not quite living, and the not yet dead. In my reading, the figure of the Muslim is the most visible exemplar of the 'undead' in Nehru's narrative. The figure of the undead ruffles the text-ure of The Discovery of India, rupturing the plenitude and fullness of the nation's spatio-temporal modality that 'life' continually seeks to construct. It also propels the emancipatory claims made on behalf of the imagined national community into the domain of the 'inhuman technic' of the state. The non-synchronicity in this attempted identity of the nation and the state is the fundamental tension in Nehru's narrative, the spectres of which haunt the South Asian subcontinent to the present day.