Frank J. korom
Boston University
Jan magnusson
Lund University
Guest Editors’ Introduction
South Asian Nationalisms
This article intends to raise questions related to nationalism in South Asia, while
also addressing the rationale for this special issue. Is nationalism a monolithic
construct based on a European precedent or is it something much larger that is
developed pluralistically in a variety of contexts around the world? If the latter
is true, which is our position, then how do we go about studying the various
versions of global nationalism? We argue that good comparison is based on both
similarity and difference. To make a case for multiple versions of nationalism,
the articles included herein focus on the Indian Subcontinent. Each article looks
at a particular country belonging to the South Asian Association for Regional
Cooperation (SAARC), the intergovernmental group representing the geopolitical
union of states in South Asia, which was founded in Dhaka, Bangladesh in 1985.
The overall purpose of this collection of articles is to highlight the varieties
of nationalism found in the region, with the goal of interrogating the idea of
a singular form of nationalism inherited by postcolonial societies from their
European colonizers.
Keywords: hyphenation—nationalism—nation states—religion—SAARC—South
Asia—vernacularization
Asian Ethnology Volume 80, Number 1 • 2021, 5–18
© Nanzan University Anthropological Institute
I
n his book Playing the Nation Game, Benjamin Zachariah (2011) asserts that
too many Indian historians have tended to fetishize nationalism at the cost
of excluding popularly perceived “inauthentic” communities by the muting of
distinctive social differences based on such things as class and gender, for instance
(ibid., 2). Historians have been “playing the nation game,” as he calls it, by taking
for granted—and sometimes not even questioning—the metanarrative of a baseline
“natural,” majoritarian, and state-supported form of nationalism. In the process
historians, South Asian historians in particular, create a residual, default position
from which history is rewritten.
In this special issue of Asian Ethnology, the contributors collectively want to
address some, if not all, of the questions and issues pertaining to nationalism often
left unattended by such default historians mentioned by Zachariah. Breaking with
the metanarrative of majoritarian nationalism, the articles in this volume attempt to
expose a sense of the plurality associated with the contestation of the multiple forms
of nationalism at work in South Asia today. In other words, how do particular kinds
of nationalistic expression interact with populist nationalisms often propagated by
the state?
Looking at the development of the region over the recent past, we have seen
movements arise in virtually every SAARC country that take a nationalistic stance as
a means of revalorizing specific ethnic, linguistic, or religious communities, often at
the expense of other religious or ethnic minorities. At the same time, we have seen
the emergence of “vernacular” forms of nationalism (Korom 2006), the creators of
which have crafted subtle ways of opposing the hegemony of the state to receive
recognition on behalf of a downtrodden or forgotten minority group on their own
linguistic and local terms. Clearly, new forms of nationalism seem to be on the rise
in South Asia. Such forms need to be identified, interrogated, and critically analyzed
to provide us with a better understanding of the current dynamics concerning
cultural politics in the region. To this end, the guest editors of this special issue
undertook the responsibility of organizing a workshop that would bring together an
interdisciplinary group of scholars to explore nationalisms in all of the countries of
South Asia, with the exception of Afghanistan, which we unfortunately excluded, due
to reasons beyond our control.
The contributions are grounded mostly in the intricate processes of the postindependence making of South Asian nation states that resulted from decolonization.
6
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korom and magnusson: guest editors’ introduction
| 7
To this end, we are essentially using the concept “nation state” without the hyphen,
as it is by the hyphenation—the linkage of nation and state—that other, alternative
nationalisms and their expressions are excluded and/or muted. Typical dictionary
definitions of nation-state with the hyphen, for example, emphasize a sovereign
state whose citizens are relatively homogenous in terms of language and culture,
while stressing a genealogy of common descent. The contributions included
herein recognize the state’s attempt to patrol and control heterogeneity, but they
also emphasize the variations that nationalism takes in the public sphere, where
contestation and resistance to governmental control can take many forms, ranging
from dietary habits and street parades to dancing and singing.
After Arjun Appadurai’s influential writings (for example 2003) concerning
globalization and the crisis of the so-called “nation-state,” what Antonsich (2009,
1) has termed the “crisis of the hyphen,” it is important to scrutinize the terms we
use. Broadly speaking, Appadurai identifies the crisis as an incongruity between the
nation and the state (ibid.). Much of the focus on globalization in recent years has
been on migration and transnational mobility, how homogeneous nation states are
becoming increasingly heterogeneous, multicultural, and multinational as a result
of the transnational fluidity of people, things, and ideas that constantly crisscross
national borders to test the boundaries of the state, which forces us to question the
homogeneity subtly proposed by the term nation-state with the hyphen. While it
is a relatively minute point, it is worth keeping in mind the absence of the hyphen
as a way of approaching the multiple views of nationalism within any one given
autonomous and independent country, as the articles collected herein suggest.
While this characterization of transnationalism is certainly true, our main reason
for dropping the hyphen in “nation-state” is to make it possible for us to decouple
nation from territory in a way that challenges the powerful hegemonic discourses
on the homogeneous ideologies pertaining to nationalism that are propagated by
states. We also wish to recognize the multiplicity of religious, linguistic, and cultural
differences within the states of South Asia. Being a geographic region rich in cultures,
languages, and religious traditions, we want to emphasize the plurality of traditions
(Ben-Amos 1984), despite the official ideologies of states that want to impose a
seamless form of homogeneity that resists difference as a way of emphasizing
sameness and uniformity.
The contributors are concerned with top-down state-making and the nationmaking projects of new states (Weinstock 2004) based on what we might wish to term
the “reterritorialization” of South Asia after British rule and the internal colonization
of minorities that followed thereafter, such as what occurred in Assam, when it
was noticeably overrun by Bengalis who filled administrative vacuums left by the
exit of the foreign colonialists. After the end of the colonial period the region was
divided into independent and sovereign nation states that had to invent new and
corresponding nationhoods in which everyone who lived within the state’s borders
would belong (Zachariah 2011, 125). Slogans like, “from Kashmir to Kanyakumari,
we are one” emerged rapidly across South Asia during the postcolonial period in
an attempt to create unified and harmonious ideologies of belonging, despite the
imagined nature of such popular sayings. Obviously, those nations had “no necessary
8 | Asian Ethnology 80/1 • 2021
continuity with any existing collectives” (ibid., 211), nor any common past, sharing
only confinement within new borders hastily created at the time of Independence
without any plausible exit options. The ongoing tension between India and Pakistan
over Kashmir, for instance, is one example of such confinement that is once again
in the news, due to India’s abolishing of their portion of the state’s special status.
Such post-Independence moves strategically involved a top-down disciplining of
“actually experienced identities to conform to the requirements of a nationalism . . .
available in the service of [a] state” (ibid., 4) and the “remoulding of other conflicting
collective identities” (ibid., 16). Categories such as “culture” and “history” had to
be reconfigured according to new borders that were conceived of as secular, civic
nationhoods or in nationhoods defined by a dominant majoritarian ethnic and/or
religious collective (see also Oommen 1999).
A generation of scholars, essentially following Ernest Gellner’s Nations and
Nationalism (1983), has argued that nationalism was solely a product of the West, most
importantly Europe. Gellner argues that nationalism is mostly a political construction
imposed upon societies during the transformation from premodern agricultural
lifestyles and modes of subsistence to modern lifestyles based upon industrialization
and secularization. He further argues that the transition from agrarianism to
modernity leads to cultural homogeneity, creating a so-called “high culture” that
is distinct and separate from traditional forms of peasant practice. The European
trend to modernize culture leaves very little room for religion, which must become
subordinate or even insignificant to allow for the emergence of a cosmopolitan
secularism. Gellner finally suggests that nationalism and modernity spread from
Europe to other parts of the world as a result of colonialism. This normative narrative
was challenged early on in colonial South Asia by certain members of the Indian
intelligentsia who were well acquainted with European culture.
The Bengali Nobel Laureate in Literature Rabindranath Tagore, for example,
infamously stated in his lectures on the subject that his homeland, India, never had
nationalism, what he referred to as the “No-Nation” (Tagore 1917). Commenting
on this, one perceptive observer suggested that India would have to break with the
Western concept of nationalism, or at least give it a “new content” (Nandy 1994, 2).
However, at the same time, Peter van der Veer had provided an important corrective
to this notion in his book Religious Nationalism (1994), in which he argued that while
Asia might not have had “secular” nationalism, they most certainly had “religious”
nationalism that could be traced back to precolonial interventions. Our proposed
workshop, as we had envisioned it at the time, was to be an attempt to use examples
from throughout South Asia to examine whether or not a meaningful comparison
could be made within one distinct cultural region (that is, the Indian Subcontinent).
As a collective, we wished to argue that there must surely be some parallels to
be made in terms of resource materials drawn upon by religious nationalist actors
in different South Asian countries. Despite their obvious differences, similarities,
we assumed, must be identifiable and comparable on some level. But comparison
must not just dwell on similarities, for differences are equally significant. Thus,
drawing upon a golden, mythical past; the deification of folk heroes; the anointing of
sacred geographical sites; and the composition of epic poetry are all vehicles for the
korom and magnusson: guest editors’ introduction
| 9
expression of a religious ideology constructed for nationalistic purposes throughout
South Asia. Such similarities, though, could also be seen as only surface resemblances.
Difference could lie on a deeper level in how such motifs were enacted by the agents
who skillfully manipulated symbols to serve their own particular agendas, thereby
transforming nationalism from a singular phenomenon to one full of nuanced
pluralism (see Korom 2019a).
It was also our contention that such religious ideologies, once constructed, could
be manipulated to foment divisive ethnic politics. Divisive politics then could lead
to widespread communal violence, as has been the case in virtually every country
of South Asia after each achieved their own independence. We wished to explore
whether or not a comparative model such as the one adumbrated above might be a
better way to think about religious nationalism in South Asia than simple isolationist
analysis in which one single nation or culture is excised from its global or regional
context for the purpose of analysis.
Comparison, once the backbone of humanistic and social scientific research, has
been sidelined over the past few decades as culturally relativistic methods have
proven more dynamic for meaningful cultural analysis (see Freidenreich 2004).
Despite this, comparison seems to be making a comeback, since globalization and
transnationalism demand it, due to deterritorialization, which has led to broader
frameworks for studying the so-called “transnation” (Scher 2004). We have gone
from the “specter” of comparisons (Anderson 1998) to the “value” of them (van der
Veer 2016) in just a matter of a few decades. Some would argue that the push for
borderless studies is symptomatic of postmodernity, but is the current age in which
we are living so utterly different from the age of colonialism in which nationalist
ideologies were being formulated in Europe? Indeed, calls for walls and fences are
resurfacing in both Europe and North America as a result of deterritorialization,
which could very possibly lead to a resurgence of ethnic and linguistic nationalism
worldwide as a result of populist politics, which is on the rise virtually everywhere
on the globe, be it Brazil, India, the United States, or Poland. Thus, as a resurgence
of nationalism takes place in many locations from Hungary to the United States,
we might want to rethink how we study similar phenomena in seemingly different
contexts, where religion still plays a much more vibrant role in civil affairs (for
example, Kingston 2019). What do India and Serbia share, to cite just one provocative
comparison, despite their seemingly topographical and ideological differences from
one another (see Korom 2019b)? Good comparisons, we would argue, then, are based
on significant differences, not just similarities, as the historian of religions Jonathan
Z. Smith (1982) has argued.
The line of thought indicated in the previous paragraphs led us to assume initially
that the focus of our inquiry should be on religious nationalism. Taking our lead from
van der Veer, whose aforementioned book on religious nationalism changed the way
scholars generally think about nationalism in South Asia today, we originally set
out to focus on how religion impacts the logic and workings of nationalism on the
ground throughout South Asia, thereby expanding the scope of inquiry beyond the
elephant in the room; namely, India. To this end, we invited a variety of international
scholars coming from the disciplines of anthropology, ethnomusicology, folkloristics,
10 | Asian Ethnology 80/1 • 2021
law, literary studies, political science, religious studies, and sociology to present
their own musings on particular SAARC countries. We especially wanted to
include countries that often get overlooked at South Asia conferences, such as the
Republic of Maldives and the Kingdom of Bhutan, in order to get a better overall
perspective on nationalism in the region. With generous financial support from
the Crafoord Foundation and logistical assistance from the Swedish South Asian
Network (SASNET), the participants in our workshop gathered in Lund for two days
of presentations and discussions to see what sorts of similarities and differences
would emerge when viewing nationalism from a number of geographical and ethnic
vantage points around the Subcontinent. The articles included herein are the result
of that gathering.
What we discovered was that there was no single way of depicting nationalism
across the region, as Partha Chatterjee (1993) and Sumit Sarkar (2016) had already
posited earlier. Chatterjee (1993, 21) makes the significant point that in the case of
India, no singular version of nationalism ever existed. As such, models created for
the study of nationalism in the West, such as Gellner’s, might not be appropriate for
countries in South Asia, where totally different systems of beliefs and practices led to
the formulation of completely different and distinct ideologies that transcended such
principles as caste, class, and gender in the past and continue to do so in the present.
South Asian ideologies that demand loyalty do not have the capacity to create a
unified culture, primarily in places like India, where there is an incredible amount of
diversity with which to contend.
Religion, although often implicated in nationalistic expressions, is not always
the central, motivating factor with regard to South Asia. In other words, there is no
monolithic version of the phenomenon that applies to all of the cases that we, as a
group, investigated. To account for this, we chose to pluralize the term nationalism
in the title of this special issue. By talking about nationalism in the plural, we thus
join a host of scholars, such as Dilip P. Gaonkar (2001) on alternative modernities and
Smith (1990) on the plurality of single religious traditions, to name just two, who
assert that simplistic and universal definitions of phenomena cannot account for the
complexity of reality on the ground at any given period in time. Instead, we came to
the conclusion that nationalism in the region is quite multifaceted, expressing itself in
a variety of ways. It can be artistic (Mitter 1995), devotional (Schultz 2012), rhetorical
and visual (Pinney 2004), linguistic (Kumar 2019; Mishra 2020), literary (Harder 2010),
musical (Bakhle 2005), poetic (Korom 2006), choreographed or dramatic (Thobani
2017), celebratory or tragic (Tharoor 2018), comical (McLain 2009), violent (Brass
2003; Pandey 2008), monumental and memorial (Guha-Thakurta 2004; Jain 2021),
folkloric (Korom 2019a, 2019b), invented (Korom 1989), environmental (for example,
Gunnel and Sivaramakrishnan 2008), and even culinary (King 2019). There are truly
no ends to the ways that nationalism can potentially express itself in South Asia. Hans
Harder’s (2010) edited volume on literary nationalism in India makes this quite clear,
since there are so many vernaculars in India competing for legitimacy, sometimes at
the exclusion of others (see also Korom 2010; Mishra 2020).
The articles in this special issue only touch upon some of the ways that nationalism
plays an everyday role in people’s lives, whether they know it or not. However, while
korom and magnusson: guest editors’ introduction
| 11
not being comprehensive, the contributors expand the field of nationalism studies
in the region by providing case studies based on areas within which their own
expertise lies. Such case studies beg us to look comparatively at how nationalisms
operate. A comparative perspective is indeed what is needed, and now might be
the right moment in time to return to this much-maligned concept, as we already
suggested. Looking at nationalism comparatively allows us to see that similarities
might exist structurally (for example, Korom 2019a and 2019b), but also forces us to
see differences resulting from particular contextual anomalies that may vary from
one country to another, as two recent volumes comparing India and China suggest
(Elman and Pollock 2018; van der Veer 2013).
The articles in this volume
Peter van der Veer, who initially inspired our collective inquiries, begins our volume
by providing his inaugural musings on the topic. He focuses his attention once again
on India by asking what transcends the nation. Van der Veer sees religion as the
essence of the nation, when viewed from the perspective of hindutva or Hinduness
(Jaffrelot 1993), the current dominant ideology of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)
that was in 2019 reelected for a second term after a landslide victory at the polls. This
second term has allowed the party to become more emboldened, implementing some
rather radical policies negatively impacting Muslims in the country. As we write,
Indian Kashmir hangs in the balance after a bold move by the Modi government
in New Delhi to remove the region’s special status, thereby extremely limiting the
province’s autonomy. According to van der Veer, violence is absolutely necessary to
protect and maintain India’s sovereignty. To make this point, he walks us through the
thinking of several theorists of modernity and the nation state, looks at how violence
was earlier used in Europe as a mode of containment, then returns to India to explore
hindutva ideology further. In so doing, he is able to show how this particular ideology
of Hindu supremacy succeeds in the transcendence of secularism, thereby justifying
the use of violence as a way of providing a bolster for the maintenance of the state.
Jürgen Schafflechner’s contribution focuses on literary forms of representation
that express nationalistic ideologies. He is particularly interested in how Hindus, as
a religious minority community in Pakistan, are represented in popular literature,
especially the horror novel genre. It is in the cheap and widely available Urdu digests
dealing with fantastic and uncanny topics that one most often finds Hindus, especially
holy men such as sādhus, portrayed as exotic others, the abject outsiders who are
subject to “villainization” when they are depicted as being evil, despite the fact that
they are citizens of a new nation who did not flee to the “other side,” the majority
Hindu side, during the partition that led to the birth of Pakistan after independence
from the British Raj.
Jan Magnusson next takes us to the Western Himalayas where he looks at a crossborder region known as Baltistan. His focus is on how Baltis, an ethnic, linguistic,
and minority community divided into two parts by the Line of Control between
Pakistan and India, negotiate their minority status with the state. Using James Scott’s
(2009) idea of Zomia, he shows how the Balti minority practices the “art of not being
12 | Asian Ethnology 80/1 • 2021
governed,” as Scott cleverly puts it. He argues that despite their stake in the nation,
they also wish to attain more autonomy, especially control over cultural issues, such
as writing, poetry, and other linguistic matters. As a result, there is a certain tension
between the dual goals of self-rule and development, since the latter depends on
the state, while the former threatens it. The Baltis thus are caught in a double bind.
Being mostly Shi‘ite Muslims, they find themselves in the peculiar predicament of
being both a religious minority and an ethnolinguistic one, since they are part of the
broader Tibetan family. They are thus a minority within a minority, far outside the
mainstream, both geographically and culturally.
Next we move to Nepal, where the legal scholar Mara Malagodi provides us with an
analysis of Nepali nationalism that focuses on the perceived inviolability of the cow
in the former Hindu kingdom at the expense of the Buddhist minority groups that
populate the Himalayan region in the mountainous areas of the country outside of
the Kathmandu valley. She indicates that because Hindus are still privileged in Nepal,
a tension exists in the nation-building process. How can the state recognize cultural
diversity and majority status simultaneously, she asks. To answer this question,
she explores what has recently been termed “culinary nationalism” by Michelle T.
King (2019). How does one justify the material needs and culinary habits of a set of
culturally diverse groups of Buddhists who consume beef with the majority Hindu
community’s insistence that the cow is sacred? Here is where Appadurai’s (1981)
notion of “gastro-politics” is appropriate for thinking about how food can become
politicized for certain religious and nationalist causes. Can a “national cuisine,” in
fact, become a reality?
Mari Miyamoto, Jan Magnusson, and Frank J. Korom also explore the politics of
meat as an expression of the use of Buddhist doctrine to voice nationalist narratives
in Bhutan. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and secondary literature such as local
newspapers and internet sites, the authors look specifically at the politics of the
non-violent ritual practice of “animal saving” known as tsethar (tshe thar) and the
tension between a public transcript of this practice as a model for good citizenship
as well as a “hidden transcript” (Scott 1990) for slaughter and meat consumption,
as in the case of the disposal of so-called “unnecessary cattle” and the employment
of the services of Indian cross-border slaughterhouses. Meat eaters and slaughterers
are targeted and stigmatized as the non-Bhutanese “other.” At the same time meat
consumption continues and is legitimatized by other practices within Buddhist
doctrine as in the case of the monastic code of the “three kinds of pure meat,” in
which a monk can consume meat as long as the animal has not been killed for the
sole purpose of feeding him. Many of the same issues, by the way, have also arisen
in neighboring Tibet (Kabzung 2015). The authors also argue that contemporary
nationalism in Bhutan is an ethno-ideological form of religious nationalism that
supports the concept of an exclusive Bhutanese ethnicity, even though it does not
allow for the needs and desires of its ethnic and minority groups that depend on meat
for subsistence.
These authors also suggest that the tsethar ritual is part of a larger framework of
religious nationalism, within which Buddhist doctrine is at the core of a reinvention
or “revitalization” (Wallace 1956) of Bhutan as a country governed by “soft” values
korom and magnusson: guest editors’ introduction
| 13
as well as a more ethical alternative to societies driven by materialism and economic
growth, which might be called the “happiness quotient.” The problem is, however,
that not everyone is so happy, especially expelled Nepalis who now live as stateless
citizens in-between Bhutan and Nepal, as a result of neither country wishing to accept
them as citizens after their expulsion from their host country where they worked
as laborers for decades (see Budathoki 2019). Forced homogeneity can thus lead to
both resistance and displacement. The beef issue cannot be totally apprehended in
countries such as Nepal or Bhutan without placing it in the broader gastro-politics
(Appadurai 1981) and culinary nationalism (King 2019), as we are calling it, in India,
where the concept of the inviolability of the cow first emerged (Korom 2000; Bruckert
2019). The particular case of the cow in South Asia begs for more comparative crossborder analysis, which is precisely what the contributions on Bhutan and Nepal in
this special issue do.
Frank J. Korom moves from Bhutan to Bangladesh, the youngest independent
nation in South Asia, to explore how different expressions of nationalism are
enacted through public displays, such as holidays during which parades and other
such performative activities take on the special interests of different groups vying
for political power and cultural capital. He focuses specifically on Ekushey (ekuśe)
and New Year’s Day (nababarṣa) as memorial days for the intense expression of
nationalistic sentiment, for it is outside of the domestic sphere in which nationalism
is performed for mass consumption, but also where it is contested and negotiated
between parties with a variety of interests and agendas, both official and nonofficial. Indeed, it is in the public sphere that the symbolic dimensions of nationalism
expressed in such material objects as memorial architecture and sculpture need to be
unpacked and interpreted to understand how they provide dynamic platforms for the
multivocal expression of nationalist agendas by groups of people who have different
visions of the past. Such sentiments can be orchestrated by the state to convey a
sense of unification and secular harmony, but they can also be used as a critique of
the powers that be, sometimes drawing on hidden transcripts to convey particular
transgressive meanings not apparent on the surface. Performance is a means for
disseminating alternative points of view to achieve particular agendas not always
condoned by the state. Because public performances involve diverse audiences that
engage with performance to mutually coproduce a variety of interpretations and
meanings, agendas can become contested, Korom suggests, which leads to a variety
of responses both by the state and individual actors. Performance can thus be viewed
as a kind of embodied form of nationalism, as we find also in the contribution by
Susan Reed on Sri Lanka in this volume.
Susan Reed also uses performance as a lens through which to view nationalism
and violence in Sri Lanka, a country that is still wrapped up in an ongoing stream of
conflict, despite the end of a long and bloody civil war that officially ended in 2009.
To do this, she focuses on a Sinhala choreographer and dancer named Venuri Perera.
Reed uses thick description to analyze one specific performance by Perera, showing
how the creative arts and ritual practice can contribute to post-war reconciliation,
social transformation, and female empowerment. In so doing, she contributes to a
body of literature that shows how performance can often transcend or at least offset
14 | Asian Ethnology 80/1 • 2021
the ethnic tensions and religious rivalries that result from a form of nationalism that
has emphasized a majoritarian policy of “one nation, one language” at the expense of
ethnic and religious minorities.
Boris Wille’s focus is on the Maldives, a country often not included in discussions
of South Asia, despite its linguistic and historical ties to the Indo-Aryan world and its
proximity to Sri Lanka, which is the much better-known island nation in the region.
His study explores the relationship between Islam, the nation, and the state to argue
that Maldivian constitutional practice is hybrid in nature, and thus torn between
Western practices inherited from the colonial legacy and its long, rich history of
Islamicization. Being an Islamic “republic,” he suggests that scholars of nationalism
in South Asia need to take religious commitment much more seriously than they have
in the past. Maldivian citizens are almost totally Sunni Muslims who take religious
nationalism quite seriously, so scholars need to begin with that core identity to
understand the current state of the cultural and political dynamics there.
Lastly, the political scientist Ted Svensson closes this special issue with an
afterword in which he reflects on each of the contributions included herein by asking
what we have to gain from studying nationalism comparatively in South Asia. He
indicates that comparing nationalisms in the region is not an easy task, especially
since the articles all take divergent methodological and theoretical paths. He
further points out both cohesions and incongruities in the collected articles before
concluding with his own reflections on the promises and perils of studying South
Asian nationalisms.
In bringing these articles together as a thematic set focusing on the plurality of
nationalisms found in South Asia, the guest editors hope that the reader will find
and appreciate a rich set of readings that should set the stage for future debate,
contestation, and research. We also hope that this special issue will find a place in the
classroom precisely because of its broad scope. As South Asia continues to be a hot
spot for the curated exhibition of nationalistic sentiments—be it by Buddhist monks
in Bhutan and Sri Lanka, right-wing Hindu extremists in India, secularist Muslims in
Bangladesh, vernacular ethnic groups in Pakistan, or legally minded Sunni Muslims in
the Maldives and their Hindu counterparts in Nepal—we need to reflect more deeply
on the pros and cons of nationalistic ideology, how it is displayed and performed,
and what impact it has both at home and abroad. We have not really incorporated
the important role that diasporas play in the construction of global nationalism (for
example, Dufoix 1989; Rajagopal 2000), such as Hindu revivalism in the Republic of
Trinidad and Tobago or in Fiji and Mauritius, for example, where Hindu missionary
groups such as the Arya Samaj were very active during the freedom movement (see,
Vertovec 2000, 59–70), but it would be a worthy endeavor as a follow-up to the new
paths we hope to have forged here. Indeed, in a world engulfed by globalization, it
seems risky to overlook the important role that ex-patriots play in the nostalgic and
economic reconstruction of their homelands. Finally, we hope to have collectively
raised the issue of and provided some reflection on both the “specter” and “value” of
comparison in the study of nationalisms.
korom and magnusson: guest editors’ introduction
| 15
Authors
Frank J. Korom is a professor of religion and anthropology at Boston University,
where he teaches courses on South Asian religions and cultures. He is the author
and/or editor of ten books. In addition, he is co-editor of Asian Ethnology.
Jan Magnusson is an associate professor in the School of Social Work at Lund
University, Sweden, where he teaches social science theory and method. His research
interests include social change, social policy and welfare, social movements, South
Asia, and the Himalayas. He has published a number of papers on social change in
Baltistan, the Western Himalayas, and the Tibetan refugee community in India.
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