Becoming Us: Understanding Indian nationalism
As the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi completes three years of his term in office, what has changed in India? Perhaps most importantly how the country views itself.
A few years after my father moved to Delhi from Calcutta to work on the Delhi Metro Rail after a long stint at the Calcutta Metro, a new urban railway line opened in the Indian capital. The line passed through a gritty Delhi neighbourhood called Shahdara on the banks of the River Yamuna, which is a river in name alone, and a sewer in every other sense.
The night before it opened, local miscreants tore away many of the shiny railings, doors, bolts, fittings and fixures, and hinges. This appalled my father. This country, he agonised, it is almost as if it doesn’t want anything good for itself. It is almost as if no one can see anything good, anything working, anything clean in India without immediately wanting to deface it.
What saddened my father even more was that everyone seemed to think this was business as usual — but of course something nice and clean and pretty had been destroyed. What’s new about that?
The newspapers at that time were full of reports about the coming of the metro to Delhi but there was hardly a line about this sabotage. That civic and aesthetic sense would be absent among citizens was accepted with…
