Nation-state politics redefined conversion from religious change to demographic contest

Evidence

By the turn of the century, however, religious conversion came to have completely different implications in India. A new set of unfamiliar considerations entered the mix. Opposing an unpopular regime was no longer just a question of a conquering army riding into the capital, overthrowing the monarch and taking the throne. The old idea of empire was metamorphosing into the new idea of the nation state. Modern governance now involved addressing the volatile question of the right to representation: who had the right to represent the Indian people? The Hindus, the Muslims, the Sikhs, the Christians, the privileged castes, the oppressed castes, the farmers, the workers? How would the ‘self’ in self-rule—the ‘swa’ in swaraj—be constituted? Who would decide? Suddenly, a people who belonged to an impossibly diverse range of races, castes, tribes and religions—who, between them, spoke more than one thousand languages—had to be transformed into modern citizens of a modern nation. The process of synthetic homogenisation began to have the opposite effect. Even as the modern Indian nation constituted itself, it began to fracture. — Ambedkar, B R, Annihilation of Caste_ The Annotated…, 143

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘synthetic homogenisation fracturing’ dynamic parallels debates about nationalism elsewhere — Anderson’s imagined communities and the push toward uniformity that produces fragmentation. — connects to: The substance behind democratic homogeneity shifts historically, from religious conviction to national belonging. — Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, 176