Review essay. India's songs: the politics of recasting the nation

摘要

Narrating the nation-any nation-is a political and imaginative act, equal parts storytelling and science, passion and propaganda, mythmaking and memorializing. The process of drawing the contours of the nation, filling in its spaces and venerating a particular sense of lineage and evolution are important constitutive elements of constructing a national identity-of a state, of a people, and of a place. For India, as with so many other places in the world, the stories that describe it and the stories that as a nation it tells about itself are many. Orientalist depictions often begin and end with tales of a land and people mysterious, ancient, and exotic, though in some views fallen far from that glory in the present day, as described by the title of AL Basham's influential The Wonder That Was India (1954).