Signifying the Nation: Identity, Authenticity and the Ageing Body in the Post-Independence Hindi Short Story

Abstract

It is now a commonplace of postcolonial theory that the nation is always embodied and that the idealized body within any nationalistic discourse is always gendered. The trope of gendering the nation, which entails a denial of subjectivity and agency to the woman except insofar as she upholds the idea of nation, has been the subject of numerous critiques in the past two decades.1 Historians of colonial India in particular have devoted a great deal of attention to ways in which the colonized nation has been allegorized as the female figure.2 The main intellectual inheritance of the last two decades which has paved the way for such critiques has been the challenge to the essential categories of identity formation, most notably gender, but also race, class, ethnicity and sexuality. Under the sign of postmodernism and through a discourse of hybridity, these categories have been disrupted within critiques of various forms of social and political organization, such as the nation and the family. There is, however, another essential category which is as complex, fragmented, dispersed, multiple, contested and conflictual as any of the above, and which is, moreover, as important to the formation of the nation and the family, but which has not been subjected to the same scrutiny: the category of age. Using Partha Chatterjee’s division between the inner and the outer spheres as a paradigm for the way in which the nation is imagined within the nationalist discourse, I argue that in post-Independence India the middle-class woman as the representative of the inner sphere becomes Signifying the Nation