Beyond Belief

Srirupa Roy is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She is a coeditor of Violence and Democracy in India.

• Preface and Acknowledgments viiIntroduction. Imagining Institutions, Instituting Diversity: Toward a Theory of Nation-State Formation 11. Moving Pictures: The Films Division of India and the Visual Practices of the Nation-State 322. Marching in Time: Republic Day Parades and the Ritual Practices of the Nation-State 663. Indian Darkness: Science, Development, and the Needs Discourse of the Nation-State 1054. Cities of Hope: Steel Townships and the Spatial Practices of the Nation-State 133Conclusion. After Midnight 157Notes 171Bibliography 219Index 237

“Srirupa Roy offers fresh, innovative, and highly original perspectives on how the Indian nation-state set out to manufacture a national modernity and new ways of presenting itself. This is a much needed contribution to a critical assessment of the now quasi-mythical Nehruvian decades of postcolonial state formation from one of the best political scientists writing on India today.”-Thomas Blom Hansen, University of Amsterdam “This book marks a departure in the study of Indian nationalism. Srirupa Roy’s idea that nationalism works not as a ‘belief’ but through practices that seek to ground the state deeply in the life of the people, is demonstrated here by archival and ethnographic explorations of specific sites: rituals and pageantry of the state, official newsreels and documentaries, planned scientific institutions and industrial cities. The result is fine-grained political analysis enriched at every turn by the author’s judicious use of history and ethnography.”-Dipesh Chakrabarty, author of Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies “Srirupa Roy . . . has written an engaging and incisive study of the nation-building project in India. . . . Roy’s book is a welcome and original investigation into the origin and means of the national imagination of India.” - Simona Vittorini (Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism) “Srirupa Roy’s Beyond Belief is a superb contribution to the study of postcolonial nationalism and the complex lives of the postcolonial Indian nation-state. . . . [T]he book is an excellent and invaluable addition to the literature on Indian nationalism and the Indian nation-state as well as an important contribution to theories of nationalism, the state, and nation-state, and postcolonial studies. Lucid and concise, the book is extremely well written. Different methodological and disciplinary perspectives are employed in the text with rigor and carefulness to enrich one another.” - Rohit Chopra (H-Nationalism, H-Net Reviews)