Cultural Similarities in Dissonance with Territorial Nationalism

Politics in postcolonial South Asia was guided more by the territorial concept of sovereignty and nurtured through the appropriation of cultural capital leading to the reinforcement of ultra-nationalism. The focus of the nation-building project has been on monocultural and hegemonic nationality. Its interaction with a multicultural social reality produced conflicts, which often took a violent turn.

There is a need for examining how far the multicultural character of societies in South Asia could find the corresponding expression in the practice of politics and state structure. The denial of access to different cultural groups to their language, culture and other resources due to the interactive relationship between the structural conditions and state apparatus has alienated a large section of the state from their culture, language and physical and material resource base. To put it differently, the territorial concept of sovereignty has made it cumbersome to disengage their economies at the nati­onal level and, more specifically, from the intricacies of the borderlands.