On the Problem of Nation(alism): Persistence and Absence in the Indian Post-Colony

Abstract

The search for an origin of the nation is destined to remain structured by an aporia that signals the productive irresolution of signification. In a sense, presence is always to arrive in the future, to be made anew. In post-colonial India the Muslim other embodies the ghostly trace of an undecidable figure that characterizes the aporia at the heart of the claim of Hindutva nationalism to a universal purchase on Mother India. The Muslim other then, as the ghost of the undecidable, becomes a metaphor for the fundamental fracture or split in the Hindutva nationalist imaginary, a specter which cannot be resolved and which indeed founds the very (im)possibility of the Hindutva Indian nation itself.