Why I Am A Fundamentalist

There is no dearth of books, essays, articles, and meditations that go by the generic title 'Why I am not a X' where X could be anything from a Hindu to a Christian to a Marxist to a liberal to a Muslim to an ecologist to a footballer's-wife to a cellphone-user to a blogger. There seems, however, to be a relative scarcity of similar reflections under the label 'Why I am a X'. The X that would fill in for me the blank in that statement would be the following type of a fundamentalist claim : The central purpose of school, college, and university education is to eradicate from the human heart all possible traces of Nationalism, and to the extent that I am passionately, even fanatically if you like, committed to this belief, I am a self-styled fundamentalist.

The reason for this fundamentalist expression of mine can be stated quite precisely. I believe that what we refer to, in social and political theory, as the 'nation-state' is nothing but a delusive fiction that exists nowhere but in the pure (that is, formally empty) subjectivity of the human mind. What we call 'India' or 'Bangladesh' or 'Ukraine' or 'Germany' or 'Ethiopia' is nothing more than a pattern of whimsical zig-zag lines that we (or, more accurately, those who practise High Diplomacy) draw with pen and pencil on a sheet of paper. Therefore, I would re-define 'Nationalism' exhaustively and absolutely in functional terms as the possession of a piece of paper that identifies you in thoroughly arbitrary terms as an inhabitant of a certain piece of land; speaking for myself, therefore, I am 'Indian' only in the sense that I have an Indian passport, nothing more, nothing less. My functionalist understanding of Nationalism is integrally connected with my fanatical belief that what is glorified as 'love of the Motherland' or 'love for one's homesoil' is a reactionary, antiquated, prehistoric, patriarchal, and barbaric emotion, and that the complete extirpation of all possible elements of this love is one of the foremost aims of what is known as education.

Looking back at my early childhood, I can see that the seeds of this fundamentalism were always latent in me, and, in particular, I remember how at the age of ten these words of Marcus Aurelius had a powerful impact on me : I am a citizen of the world, and let nobody call me a Roman. Much later, when I began to read more and more of and about European thought, I realised that my disdainful stance towards 'nationalism' could easily be misunderstood as a wholehearted acceptance of 'all things Western'. However, one aspect of my fundamentalist attitude is that I make a very rigorous separation between the 'nation-state' and 'socio-cultural matrices', so that when I say that the only thing 'Indian' about me is my passport (which, again, is nothing but a few pieces of ordinary paper), I am referring in such contexts to the former and not to the latter. It is not the richness, the ambiguities, the complexities, and the inner tensions of the linguistic, cultural, and anthropological diversity that I reject, but the notion that a fictitious entity called 'India' must be carved up by imposing arbitrary lines onto sheets of paper (sometimes even over mountains and seas which are uninhabited anyway); that an elaborately hierarchical apparatus of government machinery must be set up to 'brainwash' children into believing that it is their highest destiny to do or die at all costs for this (fabricated) reality; that prodigious amounts of resources, natural and human, must be diverted into paying armed forces whose sole purpose of existence is the maintenance of these illusory lines; that tremendous emphasis must be laid on spreading the vicious belief that some human beings become at once more worthy of your love, compassion, and generosity simply by having the label 'Indian' stuck onto their shirt-collars like a dog-tag; and that staggering levels of untruth must be propagated to perpetuate the myth that nothing good, wholesome or valuable has ever existed outside those constricted boundaries.

In short, one vital feature of my fundamentalism is that all nation-states (irrespective of what they are, 'India', 'Nepal', 'Italy', 'Japan', 'USA', 'Canada', 'China', 'Algeria', 'Bolivia' or 'Malaysia') are simply fictitious and phantom bodies that exist nowhere but in the government-aided hallucinatory fantasies of pencil-happy cartographers. Just as we have some reductionists in our midst who make the generic claim that 'X is nothing but Y, where Y can be your genes, your culture, atoms, electrons, or energy' I too would claim in a parallel manner that 'Nationalism is nothing but the mass illusion that a certain set of non-existent lines exists'. I am nevertheless willing to concede that it may be impossible for us belligerent human beings to live in peace unless we have the emotional security of our little maps. However, I would see this as a source not of mutual pride but of collective shame : it is a sign and a most potent reminder of our fallen existence that we are so willing to deceive ourselves into believing that lines which exist not on the real soil but on government-printed paper are powerful enough to divide ourselves in our shared humanity.

Finally, I cannot but recall the words of a 12th century theologian called Hugh of St Victor who writing within the horizons of a Mediaeval Catholicism which believed that this world is but a temporary stopping-place said : 'The man who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; he to whom every country is as his native land is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world has become a foreign land.'