Brand New Nation: Capitalist Dreams and Nationalist Designs in Twenty-First-Century India

"In a bid to become an attractive investment destination and the land of limitless opportunity in the global economy, India has undergone a dramatic image makeover over two decades of economic reforms. The "new India" - shorthand for prosperous, techno-friendly, enterprising, middle-class beneficiaries of the gains of economic reforms - signals the spectacular event of transformation that seemingly ruptured the barriers between the first and third worlds. Brand New Nation opens up a new field of inquiry to examine how this "newness" is anticipated, manufactured, and experienced in the postcolony dressed up as an emerging market. What does it even mean for a nation to be transformed into an investment destination for global capital? And when and how did the postcolony come to be perceived as the future of capitalism itself? Ravinder Kaur examines this enchanting moment of transition, which also signifies the euphoric arrival of neuzeit (new time), the epochal threshold that marks India's temporal shift into modernity. If the strange aesthetics of novelty were formed within a play of discontinuities, of tensions between the old and the new, then the ruptured surface was seemingly held together by deep, undisturbed structures of enduring timelessness. Kaur traces the history of this interwoven duality, which has long underpinned the claims of India's constant rebirth as being staged in the enigmatic theatre of timeless past and accelerated future, and the ways in which it continues to manufacture the current imaginary of 21st-century India as a global player"--
Brand New Nation captures a spectacular new moment in the life of the nation-state: its relentless transformation into an investment destination for global capital.
The first book that examines India's mega-publicity campaigns to theorize the global transformation of the nation-state into an attractive investment destination.The early twenty-first century was an optimistic moment of global futures-making. The chief narrative was the emergence of the BRICS nations —leading stars in the great spectacle of capitalist growth stories, branded afresh as resource-rich hubs of untapped talent and potential, and newly opened up for foreign investments. The old third-world nations were rapidly embracing the script of unbridled capitalism in the hope of arriving on the world stage. If the tantalizing promise of economic growth invited entrepreneurs to invest in the nation's exciting futures, it offered utopian visions of "good times," and even restoration of lost national glory, to the nation's citizens. Brand New Nation reaches into the past and, inevitably, the future of this phenomenon as well as the fundamental shifts it has wrought in our understanding of the nation-state. It reveals the on-the-ground experience of the relentless transformation of the nation-state into an "attractive investment destination" for global capital.As Ravinder Kaur provocatively argues, the brand new nation is not a mere nineteenth century re-run. It has come alive as a unified enclosure of capitalist growth and nationalist desire in the twenty-first century. Today, to be deemed an attractive nation-brand in the global economy is to be affirmed as a proper nation. The infusion of capital not only rejuvenates the nation; it also produces investment-fueled nationalism, a populist energy that can be turned into a powerful instrument of coercion. Grounded in the history of modern India, the book reveals the close kinship among identity economy and identity politics, publicity and populism, and violence and economic growth rapidly rearranging the liberal political order the world over.