What Makes a Nation? A Historical Perspective-Part-II

The nation’s citizenship recognizes the individual’s membership of a nation. This is quite evident in the passport. We are the citizens of India and when we are asked to declare our nationality we give that nationality as Indian. So it is with the people of other nations like France, Germany, Japan, Kenya, Russia etc. Peculiarly, multi-ethnicity and multiculturalism are quite pronounced in most post-colonial nations.

In these countries, the national identity is often required to contend with strong ethnic consciousness, particularly where the nation as a state fails to address the needs of the ethnic groups of citizens who then feel marginalized. The discontents then assume a centrifugal tendency and may fragment the nation into disintegration. As has been said by Ben Fowkes, “ The ethnic group (…) is a constituent of the nation. A nation may consist of several closely related ethnic groups, each of which has decided tacitly to ignore the small differences that separate them ethnically.”

A more clear formulation of a modern nation is made by Birch when he says that the modern nation is ‘an amalgam of historical communities which possessed a fairly clear sense of separate identity in the past but have now been brought together.’ This is a very important observation. It raises a question, when and by whom such a national identity is forged overcoming the separate identities of different groups of people.

To answer these questions it must be said that nation formation does not happen instantly. It is a process over some period of time. Secondly, though an elite may play a role in promoting the idea of nationalism amongst a people, the phenomenon is not simply a matter of elite consciousness but an elite consciousness spreading to be a mass phenomenon so that despite different groups of people living side by side maintaining separate identities in the past come to a concept of national unity through a historical process of assimilation.

We may take the example of France. Though it is claimed that France was the first state to emerge as a nation in European history, Eugen Weber in his book ‘Peasants into Frenchman: The Modernization of Rural France’ has convincingly shown that most rural and small town dwellers did not conceive of themselves as the members of a French nation as recently as 1870. The typical village was a physical, political, and cultural isolate. Poor road communication and an inadequate education system were some of the reasons that did not allow the mass national consciousness to grow.

The spread of education through a standardized French language, improved road communication and a mobile industrial society where the movement of people facilitated frequent contact with each other helped eliminate of isolation of villages and the process facilitated the national consciousness consolidated in France. Closer to our region, we may give an example of the Nagas.

Before the whole of Naga hills was brought under one administration by the British, Nagas were divided into different tribes isolated from each other and even fighting amongst themselves. But after sharing the same uniform administration under the British, adopting the same religion of Baptist Christianity and having to have economic and commercial transactions which necessitated frequent meeting of the members of different tribes at a common centre called the district HQs, the Naga national consciousness grew gradually. During the national struggle of Independence in British India ,this Naga national consciousness and the isolation of the area from the other parts of the country, did not allow awakening of a Pan-Indian national consciousness over this Naga mass consciousness (of course, with some exception), that gave rise to insurgency in subsequent times.

Harekrishna Deka is former DGP of Assam and a renowned critic and poet. He can be reached at: deka78@gmail.com