Skip to main content

The Pettiness of Nationalism

 ‘The Last Lesson’ is a short story written by French writer Alphonse Daudet [1840-1897] about the Franco-German War [1870]. France loses the war and two of its provinces, Alsace and Lorraine, are lost to Bismarck’s Germany. German language and culture are imposed on the people of Alsace and Lorraine.

In the story, M Hamel is a teacher in Alsace who has to leave the school where he has been teaching for 40 years. A German teacher will take over tomorrow. A nine-year-old student, Franz, feels pity for his old teacher and also for himself because he never used M Hamel’s classes for learning his own language. M Hamel teaches his last lesson. There is a palpable sadness in the classroom accentuated by an eerie silence that descends as the students do their writing tasks. A few pigeons sat on the roof of the building cooing soberly. Franz asks himself, “Will they make them sing in German, even the pigeons?”

Imposing a language and culture on a community of people is what nationalism essentially is.

A nation is an imagined political community, as Benedict Anderson said. Some people agree to live together guided by certain rules and regulations for their own welfare, progress, and security. Beyond that welfare and security, people are individuals with their own ideas and convictions about most realities. These individual differences are important too. A nation should not bulldoze over them. But nationalism often does precisely that.

Nationalism is useful only when a nation is faced with political dangers from outside. Indian nationalism was valid as an opposition to the British rule. Once we are a free nation, nationalism has little to do unless one particular community wants to impose its own culture and other concomitants on others. In other words, nationalism is always about fighting against some enemies who are perceived to be outsiders. The British were outsiders. Once they left, some people within are projected as outsiders so that nationalism has its fodder-enemy.

This is a kind of tribal mentality, says Karl Popper, one of the greatest philosophers of the 20th century. Nationalism narrows our thinking to the confines of our own tribe, our own clan, our own noses. Our culture, our language, our religion… A nationalist cannot think beyond those ‘ours’.

Bismarck was a nationalist guided by tribal instincts. He wanted all people of German origins to be one nation (one tribe). The people of Alsace and Lorraine did not want to be separated from France and become parts of Germany. Yet Bismarck took them by force. He wanted to impose his language on the pigeons! That is nationalism in effect.

India has arguably more diversity than any other nation. This diversity is one of its charms. Why would anyone want to destroy it by homogenisation? Why have one language instead of the 2000 languages? Why have one religion if people wish to have their own gods? Why impose your culture on others? [The situation has become so ludicrous that many nationalist states have even enacted rules about who can love whom!]

Petty minds think that their culture, their religion, their language are the best. They erect a whole civilisational edifice consisting of these with its foundation lying in some prehistoric myths. They fight wars in the name of that mythical edifice. They kill. Killing is sacred because it is for a cause projected as noble: nationalism. In plain words, nationalism is just a veneer of sophistication thrown over the violent instincts of people who refused or failed to become civilised enough to accept the otherness of others.

PS. Written for Indispire Edition 354: Yuval Noah Harari referred to nationalism as fiction. A nation is a community held together by people's imagination. Do you agree? #Nationalism

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

The Veiled Women

One of the controversies that has been raging in Kerala for quite some time now is about a girl student’s decision to wear the hijab to school. The school run by Christian nuns did not appreciate the girl’s choice of religious identity over the school uniform and punished her by making her stand outside the classroom. The matter was taken up immediately by a fundamentalist Muslim organisation (SDPI) which created the usual sound and fury on the campus as well as outside. Kerala is a liberal state in which Hindus (55%), Muslims (27%), and Christians (18%) have been living in fair though superficial harmony even after Modi’s BJP with its cantankerous exclusivism assumed power in Delhi. Maybe, Modi created much insecurity feeling among the Muslims in Kerala too resulting in some reactionary moves like the hijab mentioned above. The school could have handled it diplomatically given the general nature of Muslims which is not quite amenable to sense and sensibility. From the time I shi...

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...

Helpless Gods

Illustration by Gemini Six decades ago, Kerala’s beloved poet Vayalar Ramavarma sang about gods that don’t open their eyes, don’t know joy or sorrow, but are mere clay idols. The movie that carried the song was a hit in Kerala in the late 1960s. I was only seven when the movie was released. The impact of the song, like many others composed by the same poet, sank into me a little later as I grew up. Our gods are quite useless; they are little more than narcissists who demand fresh and fragrant flowers only to fling them when they wither. Six decades after Kerala’s poet questioned the potency of gods, the Chief Justice of India had a shoe flung at him by a lawyer for the same thing: questioning the worth of gods. The lawyer was demanding the replacement of a damaged idol of god Vishnu and the Chief Justice wondered why gods couldn’t take care of themselves since they are omnipotent. The lawyer flung his shoe at the Chief Justice to prove his devotion to a god. From Vayalar of 196...