Nationalism and Our Imagination: The View from Campus

“Nationalism is produced by tapping the most private attachment to ground for the purposes of the most public statecraft.” 

Every Ashoka student knows the experience of coming home and only being able to see the world through the lens of hyperspecific theory. As Operation Sindhoor unfolded, I found myself seeing Spivak’s Nationalism and the Imagination everywhere. Not because it offered the cleanest explanation, but simply because I could not unsee it — in how people reacted, our framing, and in the narration of conflict and belonging.

Spivak argues that nationalism doesn’t root itself in spectacle or strategy, but in affect. It draws from the most intimate comforts — language, birth, memory — and turns them into scaffolding for political loyalty. Nationalism feels personal because it is; it borrows its legitimacy from the textures of everyday life. That’s what makes it hard to see as an ideology. That’s also what makes it difficult to let go of.

The movement Spivak traces has, in many ways, always already happened — its origin difficult to trace, its authority drawn from the very claim that it has always been there. It’s also important to see that Spivak’s theory is shaped by the afterlife of the empire. Her reflections emerge from the long tail of colonialism and Partition. This grounding matters because it shows how nationalism forms not just through grand events and spectacle, but through what empire leaves behind in the everyday. As she writes, nationalism draws on “the comfort felt in one’s mother tongue and one’s corner of the sidewalk”. 

Private attachment becomes public statecraft, meaning the nation (as affective community) is mobilised by the nation-state (as apparatus), often without the distinction being clearly perceived. And that’s the real stake: if nationalism emerges from affect, from the things that shape us before we even realise it, then it is not something we can simply shed. We already live inside it. Which means the question is no longer whether we do, but how we can. What kind of political language becomes possible when we accept that we inhabit the nation no matter what?

Travelling home during Sindhoor, I’m sure, marked an experience of contrast for many of us. I felt like I was being cycled through very different thought worlds. The louder, more declarative forms came through the news anchors’ statements of pride, sacrifice, and unity. But what I found harder to argue against was the quieter, more ambient kind — a feeling that something difficult had been done and that you were meant to feel a certain way about it. Belonging, maybe. At Ashoka, that feeling was absent. Operation Sindhoor was called a genocide. The war was viewed as a purely political strategy. And there was little space to even suggest that national defence might carry a kind of legitimacy. The extremes were immediate and total.

This is where the potential limits of Spivak’s argument start to show — not in her diagnosis of how nationalism takes root, but in the absence of tools for how to inhabit that rootedness differently. Her account helps explain why nationalism is so compelling, but less so how we might stay with that intimacy without being consumed by it. At Ashoka, this tension plays out in the way nationalism has been vernacularised, absorbed into a certain academic mode of speech that often performs its politics through moral certainty. That grammar shows up in how we say “Modi just wants a war,” casually compare Sindhoor to Israel-Palestine, or post that there is no such thing as humane warfare. All of which may be emotionally true, but which often ignore the structural legitimacy and the necessity of national defence. The result is that jingoism and anti-jingoism start to mirror each other: equally totalising, exclusionary, and unyielding.

When critique becomes posture, the risk is that it’s not wrong, but ineffectual—built more for legibility within our own spaces than for consequence outside them.

I hesitated to write this piece because I didn’t want to be read as reacting to Professor Khan’s arrest, or worse, as excusing it. I believe the arrest was deeply wrong. But it also exposed the need to ask what we mean when we say critique. If we believe institutions matter, then critique has to be more than disavowal. It must take the work of reform seriously, sustain pressure, and insist that the institution live up to its purpose.

That’s why I struggled with Professor Khan’s argument — that the act of symbolic representation was hollow because it didn’t reflect the lived realities of Muslims in India. Yes, symbolism is symbolic. But suggesting that representation must wait until equality is felt risks undoing what representation can actually do. Visibility doesn’t erase injustice, but it can shape perception, shift narratives, and make presence felt. 

And of course, this is sharpened by what was happening on the other end of the spectrum: the consolidation of nationalist sentiment just as rigid and exclusionary as its counterpoint. On both the Indian and Pakistani sides, coverage was intensely polarised. Everything was flattened into either pride or betrayal, loyalty or dissent.

A recent exchange in The Indian Express, which began between Yogendra Yadav and Suhas Palshikar but has since expanded into a five-response series, reflects just how present questions of nationalism have been in the Indian mind over the past month. Yadav described the nationalism we inherited as one of “belonging without othering,” and said that if we believe in it, we have to try to own it again. Palshikar questioned whether that vision ever fully existed, whether what we’ve lost was already contested, vulnerable. But neither questioned that the challenge remains: how do we live with the idea of a nation that still needs to be made, still needs to be fought for, but also needs to be inhabited now.

Now that the conflict has receded, the question becomes: what are we left with? What remains of the feelings it stirred, and how do we hold them once urgency has passed? If nationalism is built from the private and ordinary, then it doesn’t simply cease. And perhaps this is where the harder (and more important) work lies: in how we reflect, how we critique, how we inhabit the idea of the nation going forward. As Yadav suggests, owning up to and reclaiming the legacy of Indian nationalism may be the most pressing intellectual and political challenge of our times. Responsibility, then, is in allowing those convictions to inform our political attention, even and especially after the moment has passed.

The views, opinions, thoughts, or perspectives expressed in this article belong solely to the writer and do not necessarily reflect the views, policies, or positions of The Edict.