Nationalism is not going to run out of steam soon. It has gained a new lease of public life with so-called “strongmen” at the helm of sever...
Nationalism is not going to run out of steam soon. It has gained a new lease of public life with so-called “strongmen” at the helm of several democratic nation states, including Nepal and India, in the past few years. Leaders who have risen with popular support have anchored their relevance and justification for continuing in power in the longstanding ideology of nationalism.
What KP Oli was to Nepal was not very different from what Narendra Modi is to India now. Nor is Nepal’s panchayat-nationalism particularly dissimilar from India’s Hindu nationalism. Maybe because of its perseverance as an ideology, the academic examination of nationalism is an ongoing process.
In his 2020 book I Am the People: Reflections on Popular Sovereignty Today, Partha Chatterjee wrote that he had expected the counter-hegemonic initiatives of subalterns to begin against the hegemony imposed by elected strongmen. A year later, as though to provide an intellectual arsenal to those trying to formulate counter-hegemonic strategies in several discreet locations, Chatterjee has published that serves the purpose of a manifesto, The Truths and Lies of Nationalism: As Narrated by Charvak.
In this book, the materialist school or idea of Charvaka has metamorphosed into a personified narrator to expose the lies of nationalism and to lift the...
