What Makes a Nation Hang Together: Ambedkar’s Idea of India

To most people even a cursory examination of the idea of nation indicates that it is almost normal. It is as if the idea always existed. Its presence being as natural to people as is the light of the day. To many, the idealisation and rumination of the medieval or even the ancient past of India happens through the current geographical boundaries demarcating the modern-day nation state – a territorial boundary bestowed by British colonialism to many such nation states in the global South today. Perhaps, it might baffle some people as to how countries organised themselves before the ideology of nation was ever invented. However, tracing the evolution of ‘nation state’ is not the subject matter of this essay.