Politics of Insecurity

Published in 1999, Postcolonial Insecurities is of enormous significance in the present context when “nation-building,” the immediate subject matter of the book, has assumed new life as the favored sound byte of American imperium. Sankaran Krishna returns the phrase to the historical circumstances of its initial emergence after the second world war, in the context of efforts to establish decolonized nation-states in Asia and Africa. With this temporal and spatial relocation, he provides a powerful and prescient account of the perils of conjoining identity and territory under the sign of the unitary nation-state.

Our critical attention is directed not only to the specific agent of nation-building nor to the problems associated with an externally imposed designer template of nation-statehood. As Krishna convincingly demonstrates, home-grown projects of nation-building have significant anti-democratic implications as well. At the same time however, the book explodes this distinction between external and domestic political projects through its historically nuanced account of how nation-building in the South Asian context has been constituted by agents and processes that unfold in both arenas. The ethical vision advanced by this book thus transcends the limiting binary of indigeneity versus foreignness, or local versus global, that confines much of political criticism and activism at the present moment.

Effortlessly weaving together discussions of nationhood and identity from a wide range of theoretical perspectives, the book is an exemplary exercise in grounded inter-disciplinary scholarship and reasoned eclecticism. Krishna brings insights from literary studies, postcolonial theory, international relations theory, comparative politics, cultural anthropology, social history, and democratic theory to bear on a clearly demarcated and specified problem. The book traverses methodological as also epistemological boundaries and shifts linguistic registers from the scholarly to the passionate without ever compromising on lucidity.

Its source material is equally diverse. The violence of ethnic nationalist movements, the dry prose of international peace treaties, the distinctive genre of political biography, the rich language of Salman Rushdie’s novels, and the televised images of political assassinations in South Asia are all, and equally, shown to constitute the very stuff of politics. Rich in empirical detail and fine-grained ethnographic observations about the South Asian post-colony, it engages at the same time with broad-ranging debates about the nature of modernity, power, and political agency in the world of nation-states. The importance of this book cannot be overstated.

Krishna’s choice of opening quotes from speeches by India’s first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, and Sri Lanka’s premier Chandrika Kumaratunga urges readers to investigate the peculiar transitive locution of the phrase “nation-building.” At the moment of Indian independence on the midnight of August 14–15, 1947, Nehru famously observed that while the declaration of national sovereignty represented the fulfillment of a historic “tryst with destiny,” significant tasks still lay ahead. Moreover, Nehru tempered his celebration of the birth of the Indian nation with a somber reminder of the many disappointments and failures encountered along the way, most notably the coincidence of national sovereignty and territorial loss that had been brought about by the imperial partition of the subcontinent along religious lines. Echoing Nehru’s ambivalent and temporally inconclusive understanding of nation-building — the nation as ‘becoming’ rather than ‘being’ — is Kumaratunga’s emphatic declaration fifty years after Sri Lanka’s independence: “we have failed in the essential task of nation-building.”

What are the implications of such narratives of the nation as failure, unkept promise, or unfulfilled dream? What relations of power and forms of subjectivity stem from such pronouncements of politics as unfinished business? To address such questions is to recognize that along with triumphalism and civilizational certitudes, discourses of anxiety and insecurity can equally inform projects of nation and state-making, and can constitute political formations that have significant anti-democratic effects. In Krishna’s account, the prevalence of such discourses can be explained by the specificity of the post-colonial situation, where nation-building is inevitably an attempt to “replicat[e] historical originals that are ersatz to begin...