A new India: Contestations of national identity at the crossroads of postcolonial aspirations and globalized imagination

Abstract

My dissertation examines contestations of national identity and representation of individual aspirations within a globalized imagination of 21st century India. In analyzing the metaphoric construction of a New India, I look at the unrestrained urbanization that has followed economic liberalization and the political mobilization of marginalized sections of the population, also concomitantly emerging within these new urbanscapes. As they intersect with new media practices, community-building and neoliberal restructuring of the state, enterprise and the individual, the tenor of a national community, previously invested in the narrative of a glorious past emerging from classical Hindu roots seem to be merging with myriad flows of globalization, transforming the social landscape of the postcolonial nation in significant ways. In studying this, my study uses archival data and ethnographic research to adopt a critical approach to communication and cultural studies with a focus on exploring how the country’s national imagination has been formed within the coordinates of the original Nehruvian trope of the nation as “a new star… of freedom in the East” and the newest construction of “India rising,” especially as it develops with relation to conditions of globalization. It examines how globalization has reconstituted the image of the nation, the national community and national prosperity, as well as development and progress – national, regional and individual – in the minds of the ordinary citizen.