Mother India - The Mythical Foundation of a Postcolonial Nation State (Part 1 and Part 2) - Detailseite

International students have to attend only Part 1 or Part 2 within the ELC Module: English Literatures and Cultures. Please agree with the seminar instructor on which part you are taking.

The idea of India as a unified territory and nation is a relatively recent one. It emerges in the 19^th century in the context of both colonial administration and the formation of an anti-colonial nationalism and independence movement(s). In this module, we will be looking at how the notion of an Indian nation state evolves from these initial discourses through independence and the partition into India and Pakistan in 1947 to a modern-day, post-liberalization India. More specifically, we will be focusing on the role of the myth of Mother India and how this problematically gendered vision of the nation is discursively mobilized.

The module consists of two interrelated seminars. The first seminar will be discussing various postcolonial theories as well as conceptualizations of myth(s) and what Benjamin and Derrida call the mystical foundation of (political) authority and the nation state.

In the second seminar, we will be looking at various literary and cultural representations of and critical engagements with the Mother India myth. These will include the very important film “Mother India” from 1957, the short stories of Mahasweti Devi and Salman Rushdie’s novel The Moor’s Last Sigh, but also the different versions of the poem “Vande Mataram” from its initial context in the 19^th-century Bengali nationalist novel Anandamath by Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay to its adoption as India’s national song in 1950 and its modern-day version(s) famously sung spontaneously by an entire stadium as India was about to win the Cricket World Cup in 2011.