Beyond Belief

Reviews / Votes

"Srirupa Roy offers fresh, innovative, and highly original perspectives on how the Indian nation-state set out to manufacture a national modernity and new ways of presenting itself. This is a much needed contribution to a critical assessment of the now quasi-mythical Nehruvian decades of postcolonial state formation from one of the best political scientists writing on India today."-Thomas Blom Hansen, University of Amsterdam "This book marks a departure in the study of Indian nationalism. Srirupa Roy's idea that nationalism works not as a 'belief' but through practices that seek to ground the state deeply in the life of the people, is demonstrated here by archival and ethnographic explorations of specific sites: rituals and pageantry of the state, official newsreels and documentaries, planned scientific institutions and industrial cities. The result is fine-grained political analysis enriched at every turn by the author's judicious use of history and ethnography."-Dipesh Chakrabarty, author of Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies "Srirupa Roy . . . has written an engaging and incisive study of the nation-building project in India. . . . Roy's book is a welcome and original investigation into the origin and means of the national imagination of India." - Simona Vittorini (Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism) "Srirupa Roy's Beyond Belief is a superb contribution to the study of postcolonial nationalism and the complex lives of the postcolonial Indian nation-state. . . . [T]he book is an excellent and invaluable addition to the literature on Indian nationalism and the Indian nation-state as well as an important contribution to theories of nationalism, the state, and nation-state, and postcolonial studies. Lucid and concise, the book is extremely well written. Different methodological and disciplinary perspectives are employed in the text with rigor and carefulness to enrich one another." - Rohit Chopra (H-Nationalism, H-Net Reviews)