Rambhakts: Defining "Us" and Depicting "Our Story" 19ing to Smith, the role of the intelligentsia is far more circumscribed than
the imagination and invention approaches suggest. As he highlights the
role of "the heritage of pre-modern ethnic ties,"^9 Hobsbawm clarifies that
nations are "dual phenomena, constructed essentially from above, but
which cannot be understood unless also analysed from below."^10 Accord-
ingly, one of the several criteria by which people indicate belonging to a
human collectivity is the membership of a historical nation. When know-
ing one's history becomes part of being a nation, we "find narration at the
centre of nation" in the form of origin stories, myths of founding fathers,
genealogies of heroes, and so forth.^11
So nation-state and national history go hand in hand in defining groups
and legitimizing the groups' actions. The nation-state has come to sym-
bolize what "we" are, and it "is the site of the most fundamental division
between inside and outside, us and them, domestic and foreign."^12 His-
tory is an inevitable prerequisite for the creation of this collective con-
sciousness and its conscious capacity to act. While creating this collective
consciousness, the self is always delineated in relation to the Other. The
constitution of the self with esteem and the Other with exoticism invari-
ably results in the disposition of the Other as a less-than-equal subject.
Hence the sociopolitical organization is rife with representational prac-
tices that are oriented more often toward "sharpening boundaries" rather
than toward "softening boundaries."^13
Contending that "every social community reproduced by the function-
ing of institutions is imaginary" and that "it is based on the projection of
individual existence into the weft of a collective narrative," Etienne Bali-
bar critiques the role of history and ideology in "the nation form." The
"pre-history events," the "qualitatively distinct events spread out over
time," which do not belong to a particular nation, are "repeated or inte-
grated into new political structures" and made to play a role in the genesis
of national formations. The historical production of the people presup-
poses the constitution of a specific ideological form that should be "a mass
phenomenon and a phenomenon of individuation" and should effect an
"interpellation of individuals as subjects." This ideological form facilitates
communication between individuals and social groups "not by suppress-
ing all differences, but by relativizing them and subordinating them to
itself in such a way that it is the symbolic difference between 'ourselves'
and 'foreigners' which wins out and which is lived as irreducible." Calling
the community instituted by the nation-state a "fictive ethnicity" ("under-
stood by analogy with the persona ficta of the juridical tradition in the sense
of an institutional effect, a 'fabrication'"), Balibar argues that "it is fictive
ethnicity which makes it possible for the expression of a pre-existing unity
to be seen in the state, and continually to measure the state against its
'historic mission' in the service of the nation and, as a consequence, to
idealize politics."^14