INSIGHT VORTEX

Introduction: Said's Orientalism and the Question of India Edward Said's Orientalism, published in 1978, remains the single most influential theoretical starting point for any critical examination of how European writing represented, and in a specific sense produced, its colonized subjects. Said's central claim, that the Orient was, in his own words, less a place than an idea, a system of representations framed by political forces bringing it into Western learning, consciousness, and empire, gave later scholars a method for reading colonial writing not as a transparent window onto a real place but as a discourse actively constructing the place it claimed only to describe. This essay applies that method specifically to the imaginary of India, examining what Said's own framework illuminates about colonial writing on the subcontinent, where that framework requires adaptation to fit India's specific case, and where its own critics, including critics working from within ...

As India approaches its 80th Independence Day on 15 August, the Har Ghar Tiranga campaign, encouraging citizens to hoist the national flag at their own homes, is once again gathering pace across the country. This article looks at this now-familiar August ritual through sociologist Robert Bellah's concept of "civil religion," the idea that even avowedly secular nations develop shared sacred symbols and rituals functioning much like religious observance, binding citizens together through collective reverence for the nation itself. Historicity: A Secular Nation's Sacred Symbols Robert Bellah, writing about the United States in a 1967 essay, observed that American public life was saturated with symbols, rituals, and language, the flag, the pledge of allegiance, presidential inaugural addresses invoking divine providence, that functioned religiously, evoking reverence, moral obligation, and collective identity, even within a constitutionally secular state that maintained f...