Using historical and ethnographic methods, this book explores transitions in popular Indian nationalism. It highlights the shifts and transitions from the Pax Britannica to the Pax Americana over the last two centuries, and examines new sources of the self as the local intersects, collides and interpenetrates with the global and national, suggesting new nationalist imperatives in the age of imperial terror.

The book engages with several significant debates such as whether colonialism constituted a violent rupture, and it suggests ways in which the pre-colonial was appropriated by colonial projects, and how colonial texts were transmuted into nationalist projects. The book goes on to review orientalism from discourse analysis of languages other than Sanskrit or English, and uses the figure of James Tod to explore vernacular orientalism and the interface between the literary, the historical and the political.

Bringing together the understanding of an ideology with that of a community, and linking the local and the global, this book will be of interest to those studying Indian Politics, Nationalism and South Asian History.