SOAS Research Online

Abstract

The focus of this paper is a famous boys’ boarding school in the North Indian city of Dehra Dun. The Doon School was founded in 1935 and was soon hailed by a wide cross‐section of the postcolonial Indian intelligentsia as the site for the production of the ‘modern ‘ Indian citizen. The discussion below suggests that we need to focus on specific sites of the production of the discourses of the nation and citizenship rather than simply announce their demise as an ‘inevitable’ by‐product of ‘globalisation'; this appears to be the stand taken by certain strands of theorisation in the so‐called globalisation debate and in particular versions of cultural studies. I argue that rather than having simply dissolved, the ‘national’ emotion, at least in the Indian context, may have been transformed into the production of ‘postcolo‐niality’ as a differentiating category to distinguish the ‘progressive’ populations of the nation state from its ‘backward’ counterparts. I employ Baudrillard's concept of the ‘real’ and Veena Das's analysis of the Union Carbide disaster at Bhopal to argue for situated analyses of the contemporary global condition.