Nation and Its Theatre: Towards a Methodology

Abstract

We, the People of Europe?—A big question mark, a question mark that Eteinne Balibar in his book We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship can afford. His concern here becomes a wide variety of socio-political questions that include questions of unification of Europe, sovereignty and citizenship in the age of globalization. This leads him to the interrogation of the ‘nation form’ and ‘nationalism’ and the relation between the two, which he studies in the light of (a) historicity of nations and of nationalisms, (b) national identities and (c) structural violence. My concern is not his study by itself, which of course is an important contribution in political philosophy in the given historical conjuncture, but rather my interest lies in the question mark. What he questions here is a certain socio-political congregation, which in reality exists. When I say, We, the people of India—this very speech act entitles me not only to my existence as an Indian alone but also to the ‘we’ as ‘us’ the ‘Indians’ who exist—is it not a matter of fact? Can I question do we Indians exist? If in political philosophy as Balibar also points out, borders and territories, state, community and ‘public’ structures, citizenship and sovereignty, rights and norms, violence and civility are considered to be speculative categories, then what is that force which makes these theoretically speculative structures inherent in terms of breakage? Or do we simply call this ‘state violence’? I think here lies the difference between Balibar’s question mark and mine. I arrive at this conclusion not because of any structural causality that is inherent to each of these questions but because certain unpredictable events and dialectic evolutions nourished the idea of ‘Indianness’ in a way that the idea of being ‘European’ did not experience. What I mean by this is a shared experience of a colonial past that functioned as an adhesive and initiated the effort of assembled individuals to dissolve the ‘seriality’ in them to create this certain ‘group’ in the Sartrean sense—I quote ‘we are free together; therefore the ensemble is free’. One could evaluate this freeness in the Indian context and to engage with that evaluation would lead me to a different direction altogether, but what I am interested in is to see how We, the people of India, came together. Within what kind of discursive matrix does such an identity lie? To engage with the material of inert determination of the future and go backward in tracing the moments of such congregations into the groupuscules that led to a massive movement against colonial power. Having said that, I limit this project, and I will explain how.