Consideraciones sobre los conceptos de nación y colonia en la independencia de la India

Abstract

This paper foregrounds new departures in the critical study of nation, empire, and history. In the first place, I begin by discussing key developments in understandings of nation and nationalism –and, by extension, state and modernity– that have emerged from within studies of India. Second, I turn to how such conceptual developments are bound to crucial considerations of colonialism and empire in scholarship on the region. Third, I cycle back to intriguing attributes of nationalist formations in order to explore, in some detail now, the terms, textures, and transformations of subaltern nationalisms on the Indian subcontinent. Fourth, I draw out the wider implications of the scholarly emphases analysed earlier for our understanding afresh the nature of history-writing at large. Fifth and finally, in place of a conclusion, I offer a few considerations of how processes of decolonization and nationalism might be approached in the future.