The View from here – Teaching ‘Popular’ Nationalism in English

Abstract

Abstract This essay situates the academic enquiry into the ‘popular’ idea of the nation within the shifting disciplinary contours of English in India. Using the iconic Bharatbala music video ‘Vande Mataram’ (1998) as a case study, it demonstrates how methods of analysis derived from literary studies may be used to engage with the mediated nature of contemporary culture; the classroom experience of ‘reading’ together a popular cultural text reflects as well as instantiates the expansion of ‘English’ at the level of both content and form. The collaborative pedagogic exercise of decoding the ‘signs’ that constitute the audio-visual text through familiar literary terms such as imagery, symbolism, setting and character reveals how the cultural discourse of nationalism – in terms of its historical legacy as well as its current political resonance – can be ‘read’ contextually using disciplinary methods of ‘English’. I argue that the ‘literary’ can no longer be defined only in terms of the nature of the text one brings into the classroom – it is a mode of analysis that can be extended to examining cultural texts in other media formats too, especially if the enterprise of ‘doing’ English in a formal, academic set-up is to be anything more than a reiteration of the value of Anglo-American canonical literature. If the English canon has traditionally been a means of teaching students how to ask fundamental questions about cultural representation, the same aim is now achieved also through the use of texts from other, more familiar and local contexts and media.