India, Aug. 16 -- How to teach the young the importance of the nation when both the Right and Left constantly declare it irrelevant?

There is a particular kind of vertigo that afflicts students (and teachers) in post-colonial democracies today. They carry two contradictory inheritances at once. From one direction-call it the cosmopolitan Left, though its provenance is broader than any single ideology-they are told that the nation-state is a colonial residue, an artificial container imposed on older, more organic solidarities of caste, region, language, or class, and that its claims on loyalty are at best sentimental and at worst reactionary. From another direction- the transactional Right of globalised capital and technocratic liberalism...