reimagined communities

what does "national identity" really even mean, anyway?

Photo by Gayatri Malhotra on Unsplash

Anyone who has ever taken a freshman-level political science course has likely encountered the work of Benedict Anderson, the Anglo-Irish political philosopher whose 1983 book Imagined Communities famously argued that the “nation” as we understand it today is “an imagined political community…imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.” Regardless, he writes, “of the actual inequality that may prevail in each, the nation is always perceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship”—a comradeship which, he argues, “makes it possible, over the past two centuries, for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly to die for such limited imaginings.” In this sense, every nation in the world today is an imagined community, constructed with the sole intention of unifying the inhabitants of a given territory so as to consolidate them under the sovereign leadership of a single political entity.

India is no exception to this rule. Despite the ancient history of the subcontinent, the territory that we now know as “India” was, in fact, never once politically unified until the end of British rule in 1947. Even the Mauryan Empire, which ruled over more of the subcontinent than any other political entity before Independence, was never able to consolidate the entire landmass under one ruler—at the empire’s greatest extent, it still did not control the southern part of the subcontinent (corresponding roughly to modern-day Kerala and Tamil Nadu). Today, the country is home to over 1.3 billion inhabitants who belong to some 3,000 caste communities, practice every major world religion, and speak as many as 780 different languages.

In other words, the construction of a single “Indian” national identity—the imagining, if you will, of a single Indian community—has always been an intentional undertaking, rather than a foregone historical conclusion. Even beyond its intentionality, such a construction has always been a distinctly political undertaking, motivated at first by the colonial designs of the British Empire and later by the anti-colonial aspirations of Independence-minded political leaders, who rightly foresaw the difficulties in securing the liberation of a disunited people from the grasp of a common colonizer.

The appalling rise in recent decades of Hindu nationalism, however, which views Indian and Hindu identity as coterminous and seeks to transform India from a secular democracy into a “Hindu Rashtra”, highlights the dangers inherent in any project of national identity construction. Such a project necessarily runs the risk, as we have seen not just in India but across the world, of degenerating into a crude chauvinism that defines national identity not on any genuinely unifying basis, but rather in terms of the socially-dominant community—in the Indian case, dominant-caste Hindus—at the expense of everyone else. In the process, the rich internal diversity that characterizes any community—imagined or otherwise—is flattened and obscured in favor of a fabricated homogeneity. Likewise, internal structures of oppression such as caste and gender are swept under the rug, and those who speak out against them are lambasted for hurting the cause of national unity—all while that same national cause is twisted to serve explicitly majoritarian ends.

Therein lies the fatal flaw of the nationalist project. By flattening a community in order to imagine it, nationalism—even in its most liberatory, anti-colonial form—allows crucial questions of power and injustice within that community to remain unaddressed, giving the worst tendencies of human society all the room they need to grow and fester beneath the surface until they inevitably spill over. This is due, in large part, to the fact that even as national identity seeks to promote internal unity, its rigid adherence to a given set of borders means that it simultaneously divides people along those same lines, defining itself in opposition to everything that lies beyond them. If my nationality is X, according to our conventional understanding of what it means to “belong” to a given nation, then that necessarily means that I cannot be Y.

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Regardless of the country in which we were brought up, every one of us is taught from an early age that national identity is fixed and finite, with rigid boundaries that neatly correspond to those that have been etched on the world map and given the name of Border. We have all been assigned, we are told, membership in a given imagined community, and it is expected that we will stick with that community, no questions asked—that in times of war or recession or other great national need, we will rally around the flag that was stamped onto our foreheads at birth.

The experience of immigration, however, shatters that illusion of fixity. Cracks begin to form in the rigid walls that supposedly enclose a person’s national identity the moment they step foot onto the soil of a new country, slowly expanding as they establish roots and begin to strive, consciously or unconsciously, towards acceptance by an unfamiliar and potentially unwelcoming society. No matter how strongly a person identifies with the nationality of the mother country, it is inevitable that as time goes on these bonds will weaken. In their place, the seeds of a new national identity—that of the destination country—will begin to sprout, nourished by symbolic milestones such as buying a home or applying for citizenship, new roots penetrating into new soil. By the time a second generation comes into the world, endowed perhaps with citizenship rights at the moment of birth, the ties of nationality that bind a diaspora to the motherland are weakened further as these roots extend themselves yet deeper into the new country’s soil.

It is from within this tension that an entire genre of art and literature has been formed, dedicated to exploring the feeling of being “caught between two worlds,” identifying fully neither with the national identity of the old country nor with that of the new. That feeling, so common in particular to second-generation immigrants, has been the subject of more essays than need ever have been written, the vast majority of which come to the same non-conclusion—that diasporic existence necessarily means being trapped in a state of perpetual limbo, infinitely suspended between two national identities and never quite fitting in with either.

This is not one of those essays. Although diasporic existence may be closely identified in our cultural imagination with feelings of rootlessness and unmooring, it doesn’t have to be that way—on the contrary, perhaps the diaspora can in fact serve as a site of identity formation rather than identity dissolution, a place to reframe our understanding of what “national identity” really means and reconstitute it in a way that takes the best of the old and infuses it with the new. Perhaps, in diaspora, we may find an opportunity to re-imagine our imagined communities through the lens of solidarity and liberation, uplifting our rich internal diversity rather than flattening it and rejecting the notion that we must accept the legitimacy of a state in order to consider ourselves part of a nation. In other words, perhaps the diaspora may offer us an opportunity to forge a new sort of national identity, sans nationalism.

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Although the bonds tying an immigrant to the national identity of their origin country may weaken over time and across generations, that doesn’t mean that they dissolve altogether—on the contrary, even as these bonds weaken, many immigrants often fight all the more fiercely to keep them from slipping away entirely, particularly as successive generations are born. From this struggle frequently arises a modified version of national identity, adapted to fit both the limitations and opportunities provided by a new social and cultural context. It is because of this gradual adaptation that, for example, my definition of what it means to be “Indian” as a second-generation Indian immigrant likely differs from my parents’ definition, which in turn likely differs from that of someone who grew up in India and never left the country. We all use the same term to describe ourselves, and yet that term means different things to all of us depending on the context in we first formed an understanding of it.

I think back to the small but tight-knit Indian community in the majority-white suburb where I grew up, where each family seemed to hail from a different part of India, and every household spoke a different language, from Marathi to Malayalam. Perhaps these subnational identities were more salient for my parents’ generation—they certainly provided ample fodder for mildly off-color jokes passed around in WhatsApp groups and at dinner parties—but insulated as we were from the internal divisions within our home country, these identities were always of secondary importance for my second-generation peers and me. What brought us together was the fact that, regardless of what state our parents were born in or what language they spoke at home, we were all part of the Indian diaspora here in the United States, and it was only on the grounds of this shared “national” identity that were able to find community.

I put “national” in quotes here because at least for me, the label of “Indian” was not so much a marker of patriotic allegiance as it was a signifier of a mutual recognition that we all had some commonality binding us together—that there existed certain grounds on which we could relate to one another, in a different sense and on a different level than we could relate to, say, our white American peers. Although I proudly called myself an Indian, however, the pride I felt in this shared Indian identity was not based in any meaningful degree of flag-waving patriotism. Rather, my pride in being Indian stemmed from the rich and diverse culture, history, and heritage that I associated with the Indian subcontinent as a whole. I was proud not of being represented by a particular flag, but rather of being rooted in a particular land.

In this sense, although I claimed membership in India’s imagined national community, for me this meant imagining the community in a social and cultural context rather than a political one. India, for me, was still a foreign country located on the other side of the world, and I saw no need to swear any particular allegiance to it as a state. If the conversations I’ve had with my second-generation peers are any indication, this does not appear to be an altogether unheard-of phenomenon—if I had to guess, I’d wager that the inherent tensions and dilemmas of self-identity that define the diasporic experience lend themselves in many ways to precisely this sort of complicated relationship to nationality, in which one feels a deep-seated affinity with a national community but no real loyalty to the state that purports to represent it.

Far from causing uncertainty and turmoil, however, perhaps this complication can offer us a way out of the nationalistic dilemma. If the nation is an imagined community, then that means that its members have the ability to reimagine that community to fit a given context—for example, in diaspora, where physical separation from the mother country necessitates a reconstruction of national identity, forged in the diasporic experience, that cuts across intercommunal divisions in order to maintain a meaningful sense of community.

This is not to say that diasporic identity is somehow “purer” or inherently less chauvinistic than traditional conceptions of national identity. On the contrary, we have seen time and time again that when people move across borders, they bring the internal injustices of their home communities—from caste to gender oppression to colorism—with them, and these injustices routinely reassert themselves in the diaspora’s understanding of national identity. In the Indian context, for example, the default image of a “true” Indian American that we see portrayed in media and perpetuated by far too many members of our own communiy is invariably that of a light-skinned, upper-caste person from a reasonably well-off background, and the experiences of those community members who do not fit this narrow picture are rarely if ever highlighted.

Nevertheless, the fact that a national identity can be reimagined by a diaspora in the first place means that, if its members are seriously committed to dismantling structures of oppression, there is no reason why they cannot reimagine it as an identity oriented towards solidarity and liberation. It means that, rather than obscuring the internal diversity of a community and presenting the dominant group as the default, a national community can in fact be reimagined to highlight that diversity, allowing it to enrich the collective understanding of what it means to belong to a given community. At the same time, such a reimagined community could—if we have the requisite resolve—shed the internal prejudices and biases that, whether we like it or not, often shape our conventional understanding of what a “true” member of that community looks like.

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If the diasporic experience complicates our conventional understandings of national borders and the identities that form around them, then perhaps it can also complicate our understanding of what it means to form these identities in the first place. Perhaps it can even lead us towards a new conception of national identity altogether—a reimagining of the national community, divorced from the misguided notion that national pride must necessarily go hand in hand with patriotic allegiance. Instead, such a reimagined community would build upon the “deep, horizontal comradeship” that, Anderson argues, ties together fellow members of a given nation, and use it to form the basis of a truly radical kinship rooted in solidarity rather than chauvinism.

Some might argue that all of this is just wishful thinking, that the very idea of a national identity is an irredeemable concept that can never be separated from the unjustifiable violence of states and borders, let alone from internal structures of oppression. Such thinking, however, falls into the same trap that chauvinistic nationalism has so cleverly laid—the misguided belief that national identity is somehow fixed and not subject to change. We imagined these communities in the first place. Maybe it’s time we reimagine them—and maybe the diaspora can show us how.

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no more mangoes is a blog by Pranay Somayajula, a D.C.-based fiction writer and essayist. If you liked this post, click the button below to subscribe for free and receive new posts in your inbox: