Has Nationalism become a bad word?

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 Crane wrote:

 rogerthat wrote:

India wasn't a NATION before British occupation helped, perversely, to unite it.  India as a CIVILIZATION existed for millennia but that's not the same thing.  Yes, a body of land somewhat resembling modern India (obviously, Pakistan and Bangladesh are no longer a part of India) existed and was addressed as Hind by the Persians. But I think they too regarded Hind as a land rather than a nation. The concept of nation state in the way we understand it is relatively new and is in many ways a response to imperialism. Oppressed peoples everywhere revolted and organised themselves as sovereign nation states no longer part of an empire. This is of course a very generalized explanation.  But one sees a spurt in the formation of sovereign nation states in the last two centuries compared to earlier times. 

It’s a mistake to conflate nation and nation-state IMHO.

 c. 1300, nacioun, "a race of people, large group of people with common ancestry and language," from Old French nacion "birth, rank; descendants, relatives; country, homeland" (12c.) and directly from Latin nationem (nominative natio) "birth, origin; breed, stock, kind, species; race of people, tribe," literally "that which has been born," from natus, past participle of nasci "be born" (Old Latin gnasci), from PIE root *gene- "give birth, beget," with derivatives referring to procreation and familial and tribal groups.

The argument could be made that it has more to do with language than with where the borders on a map happen to be in that particular decade.

Ah, but that definition doesn't really work anymore because people aren't always of the same race in a nation and they may not have common ancestry or language.  Certainly we in India still don't have one shared language except, uh, English.   Hindi is spoken by maybe a majority of the population but that still leaves out a large chunk of population that doesn't.  And there is racial diversity in terms of people from the Northeastern states differing in appearance from other Indians, a diversity that has no doubt led to problems in the past and continues to today in pockets. 

It also didn't necessarily work in the past because the Mughals came from outside but over a period of time, their culture blended with the native Indian culture and produced its own distinct style of architecture as well as dialects etc.  Hindi itself was essentially a variant of Urdu though the Brahminical class adapted Hindi to a Devanagari script and Sanskritised its vocabulary.  

Like I said, there is a reason why India was just an assortment of multiple kingdoms until the British Empire wiped out all of them (leaving a few princes to survive as rich and glorified slaves of the Empire) and inadvertently united the people in these erstwhile kingdoms into one.

Edited by rogerthat - April 14 2021 at 06:03