Nationalism and Belonging in India, Pakistan and South Central Asia: Some Comparative Observations

Abstract

The criteria invoked in the definition of national identity are commonly derived from contexts other than those of the nation‐state itself—most notably those of territoriality, language/culture, kinship/descent and religion. It therefore follows that in seeking to understand the kind of identity or belongingness invoked in a particular instance of national ideology it is necessary to explore not only the kind of nation‐state envisaged, but also those non‐national forms of belonging or community from which the national ideology may itself be historically derived. In this paper I seek to develop this argument by comparing some of the principal forms of nationalism found in India, Pakistan and Central Asia. I pay particular attention to the importance of the concept qawm, which in Pakistan, Afghanistan and elsewhere in Central Asia, is used to refer to a wide variety of groups to which people owe allegiance. Such usages alert us to the important fact that the nation, as ‘imagined community’, may have its origins as a political movement among sentiments and allegiances which draw on pre‐modern social arrangements and are in tension with ‘nationalist’ exclusivism. Even when the nation (as nation‐state) has been secured, so‐called ‘nationalist’ revivalism, while taking the nation for granted, may in fact appeal to sentiments of a different kind.