India and the Nation-State Model

Abstract

India was pushed to call itself a nation to achieve independence from British. Although many still try to identify possible nationalities inside India, it is forgotten that nation is a very recent phenomenon with its root in Biblical traditions. Through the diverse voices that conceptualized a free India during colonial times, it becomes clear that Indians did not try to make a nation and sometimes actively abhorred the European conception of race as nations. They rather saw and described India using markers from the civilization itself.