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 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

The Ugly Duckling

Source: Acting Company A. A. Milne’s one-act play, The Ugly Duckling , acquired a classical status because of the hearty humour used to present a profound theme. The King and the Queen are worried because their daughter Camilla is too ugly to get a suitor. In spite of all the devious strategies employed by the King and his Chancellor, the princess remained unmarried. Camilla was blessed with a unique beauty by her two godmothers but no one could see any beauty in her physical appearance. She has an exquisitely beautiful character. What use is character? The King asks. The play is an answer to that question. Character plays the most crucial role in our moral science books and traditional rhetoric, religious scriptures and homilies. When it comes to practical life, we look for other things such as wealth, social rank, physical looks, and so on. As the King says in this play, “If a girl is beautiful, it is easy to assume that she has, tucked away inside her, an equally beauti

Going Places with Sophie

Sophie as imagined by Copilot Designer Going Places is a short story by A R Barton prescribed for grade 12 students of a Central Education Board in India (CBSE). Sophie, the young protagonist, is just completing her school and will soon be working in a biscuit factory near her home as most girls of her socioeconomic class usually do. Sophie doesn’t want that future, though. She has big dreams. She wants to open a boutique, or become an actress, or be a fashion designer. She is in love with Danny Casey, the national football champion, and believes that he reciprocates the love. She believes that her fantasies about her meeting Danny in the arcade are real. Her father who is very practical and realistic has only contempt for Sophie’s fantasies. “One of these days you’re going to talk yourself into a load of trouble,” he warns his dreamer-daughter. The father is a traditional patriarch who works hard to get the family moving from day to day. He can be rough and blunt. He doesn’t know a

The Waste Land as a comic book

One page from the comic book Who would have imagined that T S Eliot’s convoluted poem, The Waste Land , would one day be a comic book? I was fascinated when I came to know about it from an article in Open Culture . The sample pages reproduced in the article look charming too. My first association with The Waste Land was as a postgraduate student of English literature. The imageries and motifs of the poem caught my fancy. But I’m not sure I understood its deep intricacies. The sluggish resistance to life in the opening lines shakes your very roots, “stirring dull roots with spring rain.” We don’t want to be reborn. We are happy with our hibernation. It’s a sort of spiritual hibernation. We need a reawakening. That’s what the poem is leading you to. Eliot was shaken by the disillusionment that descended on the world after the World War I. There was untold devastation which went on to exert profound impact on society, culture, and art. The war shattered the belief in progress, rat