Contestation of the Idea of Nation-State in 'everyday life'

Recently plebiscite was carried out in Crimea and it voted to join Russia and the world seemed to be divided into two poles again. The vicious and tensed memory of cold war again emerged in the minds of the people of whole world who have inclinations to see the international events. It was the part of same country which decided not to remain part of erstwhile USSR. The representation of nation-state in a homogeneous and undifferentiated monolith manner was questioned by the dominant narrative of the people of Ukraine. So, there is somewhere fragmented set of relationships between institutions with complex and uneven relationships, which is not represented in 'everyday' discourses by dominant narratives of state. These narratives are not only found in secessionist movement but also the people at periphery struggles to voice their discontent in dominant narratives be it gender, race or any other discriminated subjects. The problem emerged from the universalisation of discourses in time and spaces which were formed or formulated in a particular and specific context. The consciousness of “imagined community” is formed by discourses and categories and these discourses mask the inequality, discrimination, marginality etc.

The universalisation of identities creates several problems in everyday life of people. The concept of “imagined community” on the basis of shared linguistic, religious, ethnic or other identities calls for renouncing all other identities. Kesang Testangs film We Homes Chaps shows how the separation between home as a physical space and home as psychic space creates marginalisation, nostalgia and so on. The schools take in orphans, destitute children especially from Anglo-Indian community and Tibetan community and they were developed into people having Scottish way of life. The film very poignantly shows that only good intentions cannot work for the betterment of people. The homogenization of identity does not look at the different aspirations and it makes reconciliation with past very difficult.

The nation-state creates different discursive formations through the figure of women which has nothing to do with women per se. Also the male is symbolised in other signs in contradiction to what women stands. Partha Chatterjee, through the examples of 19th century Bengal, tries to explain it. He says that the figure of modern women were symbolised as Kamini in identification with Kanchan (gold) and this represented political and economic subordination of men by women(1993:68). He also shows how various writers of Bengal presented the image of modern women through patriarchal lens. These gender stereotypes continues even after Indian independence and marginality faced by women never became the main discourse of nationalist discourse and whenever it got prominence, it was patriarchal construction of feminity. The notion of 'shame' and 'honour' are socially constructed and women suffered most under this construction. South Asia, particularly, has had many incidents of violence against women be it liberation war of Bangladesh, partition of Indian subcontinent, riots etc. The making of nation-state and transformation in political structure witnessed large scale violence in South Asia. But, after the transformation, nation-state creates such discursive formations which constantly distances itself from these 'memory'.

The liberation war of Bangladesh witnessed large scale violence and victims of this war got compensation and new symbolism of veerangana was created to show a utopian future different from past. Yasmin Kabir, a Bangladeshi film director, who mostly depicts the marginality, faced by people in both of his films A Certain Liberation and My Migrant Soul. In the film A Certain Liberation (2003), he shows how a mad women Gurudasi Mondal represents the memory of liberation war who was raped and lost all her family members in that war. The film depicts that however she lost all the meanings of life but she wants to have a memorial after death. She has kept alive the spirit of liberation war but her conditions also show a paradox between the ideas of nation and the practice of nation-state. The film very poignantly depicts how 'history' and 'memory' are different and it also provides very useful tool for studying the co-existence of contrasting orientations towards past. The two very prominent theorist in the field of memory studies Halbwachs (1992) and Nora (1989) say that history and memory are “divergent forms of understanding the past that exist in different socio-historical contexts”(Hangen ,123). These authors represent memory as the understanding of past rooted in lived experience and history as the objectified representation of past divorced from the any direct experience of the past. Susan Hangen also make a distinction between memory and history and she uses the term history “to refer to attempts to create authoritative versions of the past and the concept of memory to capture the sense of orientations to the past that are lived, experienced and enacted”(123). So, Gurudasi Mondal represents memory of liberation war which has no place in the history of Bangladesh. These memories stand in opposition to the dominant discourse of nation and question the homogeneous representation of nation-state.

The body of women is used by instruments of power to break the movements of different types in a nation-state framework but the 'body' is not only a sight of repression but it is also used by women to protest against the policies of government. The earlier western scholarship in social theories worked on the concept of “Knowledge-body dualism” which divided human experience into bodily and cognitive realms. This kind of scholarship identifies knowledge, reason and culture with masculinity and body, nature and emotion with femininity (Levy, Rapoport 2003, 381). But the contemporary social science studies moved from seeing body as an object of domination and legitimization to perceive as subjects that creates meanings and social action (Butler, 1990). The women's body can be easily appropriated than the body of men because women's body is constituted within the rules, norms, morality, behavior etc framed by men. Therefore, protest by women through their body is protest against the normative codes of femininity and creating a counter hegemonic identity which has potential to become means for self empowerment (Levy, Rapoport 2003, 383). Kavita Joshi, who directed two films A Tale From the Margin(2006) and Some Roots Grow Upwards(2003) portrays the reality of North-Eastern state Manipur. In her film, A Tale from the Margin, she showed how the 'body' is being used by protesters against the implementation of Armed Forces Special Power Act in North-Eastern part of India. Six women paraded naked to protest against the illegitimate acts of Indian Army. Iron Sharmila is on hunger strike for last 14 years and it shows both how body became the vehicle for self emancipation and also how women broke the normative barrier of society to register their discontent.

This marginality of women is present in all of the South Asian countries. Meera Nanji, a Los Angles based film maker, who generally shows the 'moments of becoming' as the central question, in her work View From a Grain of Sand, shows how the question of loss of women's right does not revolve around Taliban rather it encompasses the 30 years of Afghan history from the rule of king Zahir Shah to the current government. Wendy Brown in her book States of Injury talks about rights and says that rights varies not only across time and culture but also around the 'vectors of power' based on race, class, gender, sexuality, age, wealth and education (1995,97). The Afghan women or the women of North-Eastern parts of India face the violence attached with the idea of nationalism. These forces of nationalism are created by 'man in the state' and made women victim of this ideology which is nowhere represented. Kavita Shah on her blog writes that marginality of North Eastern women in the mainstream media forced her to make these films. Ashish Nandi and Shiv Visvanathan therefore argue against the fixity of the idea of nationalism and says how this fixity is reinforced in the society with violence against these marginal categories of state.

The breaking of normative codes of society by women is not always accepted in dominant discourses of nation. Partha Chatterjee in the chapter Women and the Nation talks about the 'modern women' and the acceptance of this category in the dominant discourse of 20th Century Bengal. He says that the transformation of Indian society from colonial to post-colonial society was done ,if not fraudulent, then through the marginalisation of many through the mobilisations by the 'vectors of power' by the state(1993, 156). These marginalised groups also had the aspirations for lliberalisation in the colonial to post-colonial transformation. Gayati Spivok Chakravarty also writes how the subalternity of this nationalism produced contested accounts and the use of the term 'decolonisation' is misleading as the nation from above was imposed over these marginal groups. When one tries to break these normative codes then either her attempts are resisted or her success in removing obstacles posed by society is seen as exception, either it be the Gurudasi Mondal from A Certain Liberation or Manjuben from Manjuben Truck Driver. Gurudasi Mondal enters the domain of male and she can roam freely on the streets of 'liberated' Bengal then it is her madness which provides the patriarchs a reason to accept this breaking of normative codes. In a different scenario, Sherna Dastur portrays Manjuben who breaks some barriers of feminity and does a job which was exclusively seen as masculine profession. She creates an identity which is of male but she breaks even this categorisation by nit accepting some of the accepted norms in the field of truck driving. She transforms her look from typical feminine to 'angry young man” Amitabh Bachhan's image. However, she breaks the socio-economic and cultural barriers of society but at the end of the day her emancipation again comes to the cycle of patriarchal norms where she accepts the norms of family provided by customs.

The nation-state in most of the South Asian countries has moved from secular polity to either ethnicity based politics or religious politics. These changes in the polity increased the marginality of minority in South-Asian context. The internal disturbances in Sri Lanka and Afghanistan marginalised a large number of populations in the hands of majority. In the post colonial phase of South-Asian history, there is a aberration from the nationalist struggles and a new kind of identity based politics is present and it has gained power of the state in some of the countries like India and Sri Lanka. Ashish Nandy (1995) gives the historiography of 'Hindutva' movement in India and the processes attached with the rise of “religious nationalism”. The creation of myth and 'new' history to show the glorious past created different polar categories in national politics like secularism vs. pseudo-secularism, genuine history vs. false history, true nationalism vs. false or effete patriotism and so on (63). Bipan Chandra suggests that there is a “political contest between the nationalism presented by freedom movement and a new found 'pseudo-nationalism' built on the collaborationist past of the sangh parivar”( Nandy 1995; 79). Susan Hangen also shows how a new history for Mongol identity was created against the hegemonic Hindu identity in Nepal. Srilanka witnessed a long bloody civil war between Sinhalese and Tamil population and this war was based on ethnicity. Wallman defines ethnicity as “the process by which there difference is used to enhance the sense of 'us' for the purpose of organisation or identification”(1979: 3). Further, he finds that ethnicity can be possible only on the boundry of 'us' in confrontation, contact or by contrast with them. Jenkins Richard gives the account of changes in the concept of 'ethnicity'. He says that what was 'racial' before 1945 may be more publicly acceptable as ethnic today (1997: 22).

Prasanna Vithanage, famous Sri Lankan filmmaker, depicted the problem due to ethnicity based in the films Sisila Gini Gani (Fire on Ice, 1992) and Purahanda kaluwara (Death on a Full Moon Day) 1997 'everyday' life of people in Srilanka. The film Death on a Full Moon Day presents the imagery of disturbances caused by civil war. It shows the story of a father, a sister and the state. When the sons of one old man get killed in the war then his body is brought in the coffin. The state did not allow them to see the body but the father, who has some kind of instinct to predict the future, rejects the narrative of state authorities and refused to sign the form for compensation. The film represents the everyday violence of nationalism. Dubaravka Ugresic, a Croatian writer in exile, in her book The Culture of Lies quotes Yugoslav writer Daniel Kis as stating “nationalism is banal”. She says that central to nationalism is the 'seductiveness of kitsch'( Visvanathan, 2003). Further she says that nation should not be visualised today in the metaphor of salad bowl, melting pot or prison house rather the only metaphor that captures “its hysterical power and its hyperactivism is kitsch” and at the core of the kitsch is a populism that centres around what Kis called “the gingerbread heart culture”, which pours the icing of sentimentality aver the cold reality of war. She finds that nation-state creates two kinds of terror--- the terror by remembering and the terror by forgetting. Yasmin Kabir in his film “A Certain Liberation” shows the experience of Gurudasi Mondal of these types of terror.

The everyday terror of nationalism is shown in Sanjay Kak's documentary Jashn-e-Azadi. In one scene, a man is standing in front of his house and not entering into the premise and one person says that people has become so habituated of checking that without checking they do not feel the existence of self in a very militarised area. Kashmir, which is one of the most militarised part of the world, witness violence from both sides i.e. from Indian nation-state and the insurgents & terrorists. This film explores the 'everyday' life of individual in Kashmir valley and shows how the language, speech, poetry and cinema cannot show the ontological truth. Michael Mann, through the works of scholars like Leo Kuper, shows that the “monopoly of violence modern nation-state has over a territory created both the power and the desire for genocide” ( Visvanathan 2003: 2298). This film questions the very notion of freedom of India in this place.

The concept of 'sovereignty' is shown as a very sacrosanct concept for nation-states in classical political science literature and diplomatic meet but this concept has never been so sacrosanct. After World War II, the world got divided into two centres and these centres were located in Washington and Kremlin. These two centres manipulated and even destroyed the sovereignty of many nation-states. After the rapid rise of neo-liberal economic policies and establishment of process of 'Globalisation' through international organizations like International Monetary Fund, World Bank, World Trade Organization and so on, the manipulation of sovereignty of nation-states became routine phenomenon. International Monetary Fund mandates to work in the case of 'Balance of Payment' crisis. If any nation is on the verge of bankruptcy then IMF provides loan to these countries but these loans come with attached strings, the organisation tells nation-state to change economic policies and move towards more liberal and global regime, moderate deficits, and cut uneconomic spending like subsidies etc. The so called sovereign nation-state loses control over the policies of their state. The process of globalisation allowed uninterrupted flow of capital from one geographical region to another and this process also allowed flow of labour from one nation-state to another but in a very conservative manner.

The notion of fixity of boundary is now challenged by ever emerging media and social networking sites. A global community is being established which has at its core the feeling of nation-state but not the consciousness of nation-state. The process of 'glocalisation' is also happening in the realm of globalisation where global chains have local menu based on the culture of that place. However, the national boundaries are not so porous as the boundaries of cities as Saskia Sassen in her work The Global Cities(1991) talks about the rise of city-to-city cross border network. Farjad Nabi's film Nushrat has left the building...But When? shows how the national boarder are not so important for the contemporary consumption of music. Nushrat Fateh Ali Khan's talent was recognized when he was praised in the west and later he composed music for Indian film Industry and for world audience. So in the world of constant reification, the boarders of nation-state are contested through the import of culture through online media platforms and digital devices.

So, the idea of nation-state is contested on several grounds in modern times. The changing nature of functioning of economic system and the role of diaspora in political system and the election process made the boundaries not so sacrosanct and modern nation-state should be seen as a part of the 'global village syndrome' where communication provides mobility and interruption of this communication system will even create panic in the corridors of government. The consensus based approach is needed to make the functioning of state more human and inclusive. The over centralisation of power has made more prevalent “the bye-products of Baconian model” i.e. emergence of more efficient new forms of violence. If the state does not try to bring consensus then the contestation of the idea of nation-state starts from the socially assigned political, social and gender roles, work and mobility, contested ideas of boundary and contested ideas of nation.