Postcoloniality, National Identity, Globalisation and the Simulacra of the Real

Abstract

The focus of this paper is a famous boys' boarding school in the North Indian city of Dehra Dun. The Doon School was founded in 1935 and was soon hailed by a wide cross section of post‐colonial Indian intelligentsia as the site for the production of the ‘modern’ Indian citizen. The discussion below suggests that contemporary social analysis needs to focus on specific sites of the production of the discourses of the nation and citizenship rather than simply announce their dissolution as an ‘inevitable’ by‐product of ‘globalisation’; this seems to be the stand taken by certain strands of theorisation in the so‐called globalisation debate and in particular versions of cultural studies. I argue that rather than having simply dissolved, the ‘national’ emotion, at least in the Indian context, may have been transformed into the production of ‘post‐coloniality’ as a differentiating category to distinguish the ‘progressive’ populations of the nation‐state from its ‘backward’ counterparts. I employ Baudrillard's concept of the ‘real’ in order to argue for situated analyses of the contemporary global condition where analyses of the relationship between nation‐states and of the asymmetries within them continue to be important political tasks.

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