Description
The proposed study aims to critically explore the contested narratives of India’s national identity and nation-building through its postage stamps. The study argues that as official visual texts of the state, stamps offer valuable insights towards critically evaluating the political tropes of Nehruvian secularism during the formative decades of India’s independence against present-day Hindu majoritarianism in politics.
From independence until the late 1980s, the Indian National Congress (INC), being the most dominant ruling party, vigorously endorsed the ideas and ideology of the first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. The postage stamps of that era were imbued with the Nehruvian ethos of India as a secular and pluralistic state, wherein scientific temperament and planned economic development were prioritized for postcolonial nation-building. However, decades later, the electoral success of the Hindu right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in 2014, marked a paradigm shift in Indian politics.
A quick content analysis of postage stamps issued since mid-2014 reflects a statist push towards the consolidation of visual iconography around India’s civilizational past, wherein a Hindu majoritarian national identity and a neoliberal discourse of development become notable stamp themes. The BJP and its ideologues have long accused previous ruling regimes of the INC of grossly ignoring the ‘civilizational consciousness of India.’ Hence, the mundane postage stamps become contested sites where ideas about India’s national identity and nation-building are being renegotiated. Therefore, the proposed paper attempts to decipher this aspect of visual politics in India through an interpretive analysis of its stamps.
