Fifteenth International Conference on Interdisciplinary Social Sciences

Abstract

India is a country that stands delicately on a colonial construct created to define a landmass that was known throughout history for its porous borders and it’s ethnic and cultural diversity. The colonial enterprise theorised and re-theorised “Indians” to such an extent that their very identity is in crisis today. Almost 73 years later, Indians find themselves in conflict with an essential loss of an untarnished, non-oriental, “true” identity. To fill this hole another construct is created in the form of acute nationalism, that narrativizes for the contemporary Indian an identity, fashioned by a desire to simultaneously go back to lost roots and modernize completely. This is symptomatic of colonialism and the many narratives it builds for countries in attempt to define them via print capitalism. This paper identifies this crisis of identity to be at the core of all of India’s national and cultural struggles. This study considers this problem historically and attempts to arrive at a way forward.