The Enduring Silhouette Of Nationalism?

If in the last decades of the 20th century, scholars critically interrogated the idea of nations, nationalisms and nation-states for modern South Asia, current scholarship has further expanded our conceptual and geographical understanding of the region far beyond the territorial boundaries. Concerns of climate change and explorations of not just land based but water based migration of people, communities, and ideas have completely altered our understanding of the region. Yet, does this mean that the conceptual potency of nations and its associated ideas have lost its appeal? Or, has the genealogy of critical questioning of the nation inaugurated, most prominently by subaltern studies collective and postcolonial theorists, nevertheless placed us on a trajectory of reifying a profoundly diffuse, heterogeneous, non-territorial idea of the nation-form. Developed through long-term conversations with colleagues specialising in constitutional history, legal history, and literary history, this presentation interrogates how the analytical frameworks deployed to think about visual culture in modern South Asia have negotiated the category of the nation, even as they sought to underscore its limits.