Myths of the Nation: National Identity and Literary Representation

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The author traces nationalism from its abstract underpinnings to its concrete manifestation in historical fiction, which underwrites the Indian freedom struggle. The construction of identity through mythicized conceptions of India is examined in detail through Raja Rao’s first novel, Kanthapura. Written in the late 1930s at a time when nationalist ideology gained ground rapidly, the novel is also an ideal example of literary history which is very close to the history of the freedom movement in India under Gandhi’s tutelage. The author shows how orientalists, nationalists, Marxists, subalternists, and poststructuralists, have, in their own celebratory ways, used the disenfranchized sub-proletariat in their works. What she finds useful, however, is that subaltern identities are imbued with heterogeneity, thus splitting open an authoritarian and reactionary nationalism, and a continuing neo-colonialism. Over the years, there exists a contradiction between the more pronounced use of the native language and the continued dependence on Western theory. In today’s context, the nation interacts with the forces of globalization to reach a postnational thinking into previously uncharted territory especially with the onslaught of capitalism on nations of the South issuing from the ‘imperialist’ project of the United States

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Rumina Sethi Associate Professor at the Department of English, Panjab University, India