The nation-state’s representation question fractured India’s diverse peoples rather than uniting them.

Evidence

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: Resonates with scholarship on how nationalism manufactures homogeneity that then fractures along pre-existing identity lines — relevant to the reader’s interest in how caste annihilation vs. national unity played out.