Indus saga revisited

Nehru's "Glimpses" and "Discovery" impressed me, when I read them in my under-graduate days. I was too young to judge whether they were good history but I could see that, more than history, they expressed a "certain idea of India", that Nehru had. They were his declaration of love to India.

I came across the "Discovery" again after about thirty years. What struck me then about it was its amateurishness, even a bit of naivete. Nehru's "socialism" notwithstanding, there was no analysis there, just a flow of beautiful prose. The misery of the common Indian, the conflicts, the religious oppression had all given way to a smooth, almost teleological, movement of India's self-realisation. It was ideology. It was the bourgeois India's self-image, its statement of how it should be regarded whenever it emerged as an independent nation.

Nations did not exist before the 15th century (some would say before the French Revolution). Linguistic groups existed, states existed, the idea of the race and ethnic was recognised and discussed. But the nation is the gift of the bourgeoisie. Its reality is judged according to the famous five criteria. But, above all, the nation is the mystique of the nation, as it envelops the bourgeois state and the market it creates and protects for its ruling class. The nation gives legitimacy both to the state and to the rule of the bourgeois.

This national myth is created by the historians, sociologists, poets, novelists etc. After a while, it becomes a part of national ideology, which, being autonomous, stands not only outside the economic sub-structure but, to some extent, even of the super-structure, though it basically forms part of the latter and reinforces it.

There is, strictly speaking, no ideological state. But every national history is heavily tinged with ideology. The historians and other intellectual workers, not only create an auto-centric history, not only distinguish their nation sharply from others, but actually project it backward into the past, making the nation almost ahistorical. This is not just myth-making. It is an essential part of the creation of a national consciousness, which is the cement which holds a nation together.