ABSTRACT
During the anti-colonial struggle in India, the people were made to imagine the ‘nation’ as the only form of freedom. All other imaginations were thought to be ‘non-national’ and apolitical. But, the Ezhava movement in Kerala gives a different story, a different story altogether, of the discursive violence of Indian nationalism. It is a story of de-imagining the trope of the nation called India, through the autonomous construction of a distinct communal ‘identity’ – the ‘Ezhava’. This chapter is divided into three parts. The first part deals with the implicit violence of nationalism in India; the second part examines how Ezhavas in Kerala resisted the nationalist violence by imagining and deploying the idea of community. The concluding section is an exploration into the paradoxical nature of the community and situates the concept of ‘community’ in a non-substantialist way.
