INTRODUCTION

Nationalism is not only an ideology, but also a visceral sentiment. It is embodied in blood, language, in your guts. As a sentiment it is deeply connected to Romanticism, a movement that celebrates the ties between mother tongue, blood and land. In this contribution I will first discuss European Romanticism. Secondly, I will discuss how the notions developed in Romanticism also inform Indian nationalist thought about territory and language. Finally, I will discuss the intricate ways in which body and spirit are connected in Indian and Chinese forms of nationalism.
Nationalism as a sentiment is often associated with romantic notions about the connection between blood and land. Die Heimat, an ancient Germanic term for home and homeland, had its origins in a legal concept pertaining to the right to dwell or to farm in a particular place, but in eighteenth century Romanticism it came to stand for a sentimental landscape that was the subject of German poetry and painting. In Heidegger, and later Gadamer, one finds the resonances of Herder’s and Fichte’s philosophical use of Heimat as connecting language, especially when describing poetry and landscape.^[1] One of the most popular explorations of everyday belonging of ordinary Germans in the twentieth century onwards is in Edgar Reitz’s film-drama Die Heimat that was made in the 1990s. “Heimat and Language” are viscerally connected to Blut (blood) in German Romanticism. Herder’s notion of Volk is that each people has its own way of being, thinking, and feeling that is its common, sovereign purpose. This notion is also foundational to the discipline of cultural anthropology that is deeply tied to modern nationalism, especially when it developed ideas of cultural personality. It is a stream of modernity that is just as strongly associated with the nation as Enlightenment notions of citizenship and state organization are. In romantic nationalism all kinds of sentiments are evoked that bind the people (das Volk) together as a nation. It is, of course, blood or kinship-ties, it is the soil, it is the language, it is history and cultural memory. In Romanticism this is often seen as a pre-conscious ensemble that connects the individual to the nation. In its emphasis on blood and soil it develops a notion of an embodied, historical landscape – a visceral territory. This is very clear in the great, evocative landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich and other German artists in the nineteenth century. Central is feeling: great feeling like in Sehnsucht – that great desire to be where one is not, that eighteenth century disease of melancholia, Sturm und Drang.
It has often been pointed out that Tönnies’ opposition of Gemeinschaft (community) and Gesellschaft (society) partakes in this Romantic world-view that is carried on by sociologists like Amitai Etzioni. Some communitarians, like Charles Taylor, are at pains to dissociate themselves from the negative connotations of Romantic notions of community. In writing about Canadian politics Taylor actually has used the term “visceral nationalism” and has distinguished it from “community minded nationalism.” Taylor argues that Canada could not survive visceral nationalism, and that in Canada, visceral nationalism was happily impossible in any event because of Canadian diversity. Community minded nationalism, however, is laudable, for it “...draws, rather, on a sense of the significance of what a people is doing [or can do] together, of its collective achievements and its common goals.”^[2] This way of reasoning seems close to Clifford Geertz’s early formulations about the replacement of primordial bonds by civic ones, but Taylor wants to retain a sense of community without really specifying on what it would be based.^[3]
A fear of Romantic notions of community and nation is quite understandable. Romanticism as the dark underbelly of modern nationalism shows itself in xenophobia and in deep chauvinistic appeals to national self-esteem. From the Nazis of Germany, the Fascists of Italy, to reactionary right-wing groups all over the world, one can find collective fantasies that connect the individual to the national body. Even so, one has to understand that the Enlightenment stream and the Romantic stream are deeply connected in modern beliefs and practices. As Talal Asad puts it, liberal democracy rests on two secular myths that are at odds with each other:

“...the Enlightenment myth of politics as a discourse of public reason whose bond with knowledge enables the elite to direct the education of mankind, and the revolutionary myth of universal suffrage, a politics of large numbers in which the representation of “collective will” is sought by quantifying the opinion and fantasy of individual citizen-electors. The secular theory of state toleration is based on these contradictory foundations: on the one hand liberal clarity seeks to contain religious passion, on the other hand democratic numbers allow majorities to dominate minorities even if both are religiously formed.”^[4]

Asad writes here about the secular and the religious, but we may note that passions and fantasies are both religious and secular.
Romanticism is not in itself religious. In fact, it belongs to that modern transformation that Charles Taylor has called, “the affirmation of the mundane,” “the ordinary,” and ultimately “the secular.”^[5] Romanticism is secular in its emphasis on feelings that emerge from the direct experience of the mundane. Of course, one may argue that the Protestant Reformation enabled this, since the secular had to emerge from a transformation of the religious. Nevertheless, the idea of the sublime that is so crucial in Romanticism has been divorced from supernatural transcendence and is now vested in the landscape. Edmund Burke in his A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) makes a distinction between the beautiful and the sublime and draws our attention to emotions of fear and danger that are engendered by the landscape and that are not rational but overwhelming. In the Phenomenology of Religion, the idea of the sublime as especially vested in our encounter with Nature has been adopted in Rudolf Otto’s Mysterium Tremendum. The interesting thing is that here we find the inverse of the heimat and homeliness, namely das Unheimliche, or that which is outside the house of the self, culture, and nature; namely, the uncanny. Otto argues,

“Taken in the religious sense, that which is “mysterious” is – to give it perhaps the most striking expression – the “wholly other,” that which is quite beyond the sphere of the usual, the intelligible, and the familiar, which therefore falls quite outside the limits of the “canny,” and is contrasted with it, filling the mind with blank wonder and astonishment... the essential characteristic... lies in a peculiar “moment” of consciousness, to wit, the stupor before something “wholly other.”^[6]

I would suggest that it is when heimat becomes unheimlich, a mystery which we are worshipping as the uncanny, that we reach the realm of the nation. The anthropologist Thomas Csordas adopts Otto’s phenomenology of radical alterity in his understanding of the alterity of the body in relation to the self (an embodied otherness), and sees the origin of religion in it.^[7] This move of secular Romanticism into the phenomenology and anthropology of religion completes the circle from religious to secular and back to religious. This is not at all surprising, since modern Christianity quickly connects itself to Romanticism, just as it also does to rational Enlightenment. The story of secularization of the mind and feelings is first of all a story of the modernization of religion.
It does not need any further demonstration that embodied sentiments that are in the nature of a people and in the natural habitat of that people are foundational for European nationalism. While German romanticism is the great word-historical source for much of this mode of nationalist thinking, we have to realize that other nations immediately followed and developed their own romanticism.^[8] In relation to the Industrial Revolution, the British were especially concerned with landscape and the meaning of the landscape for national identity. That landscape is not a trans-historical essence, but a product of the Imperial Encounter, is something V. S. Naipaul slowly and painfully realizes in his novel The Enigma of Arrival when he starts to live in a typical English landscape.^[9] The manor he lives in has been built from wealth acquired from trade with Trinidad in the period that Naipaul’s ancestors were shipped there to work as contract-laborers on the plantations. Naipaul’s reference to this is almost as casual as the one made by Jane Austen in Mansfield Park, but it effectively shows the histories connected to the British landscape. Of course, this is also the history of the Indian landscape where Romanticism links to other aesthetic traditions, and is thus transformed while also made use of.

LAND AND LANGUAGE IN INDIA

Language, blood, and history embodied by people and landscape are also a major ingredient of Asian nationalisms, where we once again find an inter-play between the religious and the secular. Given the fragmentary nature of nationalism, I will discuss a few snapshots of visual imagery in India that are part of the wide array of practices involved in producing the nation-as-space. First of all, let us enter a country. One has to cross a border that is often not very visible. The arbitrary nature of the border is made clear in border conflicts. In South Asia it is particularly the border between Pakistan and India that is the site of dispute and ultimately armed conflict. A good example of this is the Kargil conflict in 1999. India and Pakistan share a 740 kilometer Line of Control along the Jammu-Srinagar, Srinagar-Leh roads. It must be pointed out that this is an uninhabitable area of ice and snow. There are a number of outposts that get snowed over and have to be “abandoned” by both sides until the snow melts. This leads to a game in which both parties try to seize “unoccupied” posts. In 1999 Pakistan infiltrated across a roughly one hundred kilometer frontier in the Kargil area. In reply, the Indian army conducted what it called “one of the biggest anti-militancy operations in recent years.” Highly successful air strikes by India were followed by the shooting down of two Indian jet fighters and an armed helicopter. An open war seemed unavoidable, but Pakistan decided after a number of skirmishes to withdraw.
Two things about this conflict have made a lasting impression. First, the visual imagery of soldiers in a landscape that may have seemed attractive from the 50°C heat of Delhi and Lahore, but was, in fact, completely uninhabitable, impenetrable and forbidding. To see this kind of military effort to control such an unattractive area shows the importance of the idea of territory in nationalism. Long before the Kargil conflict, in 1962, the Indians had suffered defeat in another forbidding part of the Himalayas in a conflict with China, and this continued to be a major source of national humiliation; as if one is not able to protect one’s house against intruders. Secondly, I had seldom seen Indians in such a frenzy of patriotic emotions as during the Kargil crisis. It is the narrative of masculine heroism and hero-worship for which the impenetrable mountain range is such a good background. In the end it is not territory as such that counts, but the way the landscape as a background for heroism that functions to represent the honor and sovereignty of the nation. Nation-as-space is made real by the representational theatre of the Kargil conflict.
Much of the spatial imagination of the nation is based on imperial mapping, and one of the nationalists’ projects is to provide a pre-colonial mapping that can provide deeper roots for the nation-as-space. For Savarkar, the ideology of “Hindu-nesss” (Hindutva), the basis of a Hindu nation is the sacred geography of India. Pitrbhhumi, or Fatherland, is punyabhumi, sacred land. Modern discourse on the nation as a territorially based community is connected to religious discourse on sacred space. Sacred space is constructed through ritual. In the classical Durkheimian formulation the crucial ritual act divides space into the sacred and profane; but anyone who has tried to use this opposition gets into empirical trouble. What I think ritual as spatial performance does is provide an arena of several mapping strategies.
In India pilgrimage has always been a major ritual of trans-locality.^[10] In the nineteenth century, pilgrimage networks greatly benefited from improvement in the means of communication, such as the railways, and have become increasingly important for growing parts of the population up to the present day. It is then not surprising that Vinayak D. Savarkar’s ideology of a sacred fatherland of Hindus is made visible in the 1980s with rituals that are derived from pilgrimage. The VHP^[11] experimented on a large scale with the ritual in what is called “a sacrifice for unity” (ekatmatayajna) in 1983. Sacrifice in this case referred to an extremely complex and well-organized cluster of processions that reached, according to the VHP’s estimate, some 60 million people. Three large processions (yatra) traversed India in November and December of 1993. The first started in Hardwar in the North and reached Kanyakumari (India’s southernmost point). The second, inaugurated by the King of Nepal (a Hindu kingdom that is not part of India), started in Kathmandu and reached Rameshwaram in Tamil Nadu. The third started in Gangasagar in the East and reached Somanatha in the West. Significantly, the three processions crossed in the middle of the country in Nagpur, which is not a pilgrimage center but the headquarters of the RSS. At least forty-seven smaller processions (upayatra) traversed other parts of the country connecting up at appointed meeting places with one of the three larger processions. The processions followed well-known pilgrimage routes that link major religious centers, suggesting the geographical unity of India as a sacred space of Hindus (kshetra). In this sense pilgrimage was transformed into a ritual of national integration of Hindus.
Processions of temple chariots (rathas) are an important part of temple rituals in India. An image of the god is taken for a ride in his domain, during which he confirms his territorial sovereignty and extends his blessings. The processions of the VHP made use of rathas in the form of brand-new trucks, which some critics called this Toyota-Hinduism. Each of the three main processions was named after its “chariot”: Mahadevaratha, Pashupatiratha, and Kapilaratha; names that refer to gods and saints worshiped in the places from which the processions began. The chariots carried an image of Bharat Mata. The political use of the Mother goddess in India is also known from regional parties, such as Telugu Desam, but Mother India was here projected against the map of India. The chariots also carried waterpots (kalasha) filled with local sacred water that was mixed with Ganges water, the most sacred of all. Waterpots are among the most potent symbols in Hindu ritual, signifying power and auspiciousness. This nationalist ritual is thus an assemblage of several important elements in Hindu ritual, and not merely an invention of tradition.
What is made invisible by this ritual of unity is that it is a unity against Christians and Hindus who are shown to be outside the fold. As a pilgrimage it makes invisible all the other ways to understand the sacred geography of India in terms of non-Brahmanic sites, Sufi shrines in which Hindus and Muslims come together, Christian shrines in which everyone appears, etcetera. Indeed, the reason for putting this ritual together was to launch a protest against a much-publicized mass conversion of Untouchables to Islam in Meenakshipuram in South India.
Besides the nationalization of landscape as both secular territory and sacred geography, there is another influential Romantic notion that is perhaps even more visceral than our emotional attachment to home, namely language or rather mother tongue. The locus classicus is Tamiltay, the worship of the Goddess of the Tamil language, so eloquently analyzed by Sumathi Ramaswamy who begins her book with:

“It was a quiet, cool January dawn in the South Indian city of Tirucchirappallim in the year 1964. A can in his hand, a man named Chinnasami left his home, leaving behind his ageing mother, a young wife, and infant daughter, and walked to the city’s railway station. On reaching there he doused himself with the contents and set himself afire, shouting aloud : inti olika, tamil valka (Death to Hindi, may Tamil flourish). A year after that five other men burned themselves alive “at the altar of Tamil.””^[12]

The Indian Government quickly declared that it had no intention to impose Hindi on the Tamilians. According to the Indian constitution Hindi is the official language of India, while English was only a link-language until Hindi could replace it; however, the deadline of this replacement was now made indefinite. To speed up the spread of Hindi the Sampurnanand Committee on Emotional Integration of 1962 recommended that Roman script could be used by non-Hindi speakers for Hindi, but later not much was heard of that proposal.
In Tamil nationalism the visceral and the secular seem to be deeply tied. The language issue is tied to a thorough anti-Brahmanical activism. In another, perhaps as deeply felt, language dispute between Hindi and Urdu, the religious and the visceral are immediately connected. It is, obviously, the story of communal competition since the late nineteenth century and the story of Partition that made the possibility of Hindustani politically unfeasible and left Urdu to an ever more marginal place. And, again, it is English as the language of the ruling class that looms large behind linguistic communalism as the solution for an India that can only be secular thanks to a colonial language.

BODY AND SPIRIT IN INDIA AND CHINA

Finally, after having discussed the applicability of the Romantic notions of territory and language as producing the nation in India, let me end with what Ernest Renan called “the body and soul at the same time” by discussing what is perhaps the most important example of the interplay of the visceral, the spiritual and the secular in producing the nation, namely the respective nationalization of Indian and Chinese traditions of the body through yoga and qigong.
Yoga has a long history and a foundational Sanskrit text in Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras which was probably composed around the fifth century C.E. Breathing techniques as well as other bodily exercises were developed as part of religious disciplines that also entailed image worship or asceticism.
A major achievement was Swami Vivekananda’s creation of yoga as the Indian science of supra-consciousness.^[13] Yoga was now made into the unifying sign of the Indian nation, and not only for national consumption, but for the entire world to consume. This was a new doctrine, although Vivekananda emphasized that it was ancient “wisdom.” The body exercises of hatha yoga, underpinned by a metaphysics of mind-body unity, continues to be a major article of the health industry, especially in the United States. What I find important in Vivekananda’s construction of yoga as the core of Hindu “spirituality” is that it is devoid of any specific devotional content that would involve, for example, temple worship and thus a theological and ritual position in sectarian debates.
This lack of religious specificity together with the claim to be scientific is crucial for the nationalist appeal of Vivekananda’s message. From Vivekananda’s viewpoint, religion is based upon reason, not belief. Yoga is legitimized as a scientific tradition in terms of rational criteria. An offshoot of this is that health issues could be addressed in terms of a national science of yoga. I would suggest that Vivekananda has developed a translation of Hindu traditions in terms that are remarkably similar to what is cobbled together in theosophy and its later offshoot, Steiner’s anthroposophy.
Vivekananda’s construction of spirituality and its relation with nationalism has had enormous impact on a whole range of thinkers and movements. It has influenced thinkers on India as different as Savarkar, Aurobindo, Gandhi, and Nehru, but it also has had a huge impact on a great variety of Western spiritual movements, including the current New Age-movement. It is a construction crucial to Hindu nationalism
China does not have a cultural translator like Vivekananda, a condition that can be at least partly explained by the fact that English language and literature was not a “mask of conquest” as it was in British India.^[14] But there are interesting parallels between the transformation of yoga and that of qigong in the nineteenth and twentieth century. Qigong are skills to exercise qi, to “cultivate and temper mind and body along their paths to enlightenment.” These bodily exercises are connected to conceptions of cosmology, bodily health, concentration of the mind, meditation and quietness. Together they form part of a religious tradition that dates back to the fourteenth or fifteenth century, or the middle of the Ming Dynasty. Like in the case of yoga, these conceptions are very variable, and in fact, one can say that we have here traditions of bodily exercise that can be connected to all kinds of understandings of spirituality and cosmic order. Moreover, as in yoga, there is a direct connection with health. Traditional Chinese Medicine used qi exercises to improve the health of “the sick and the weak.” So qi exercises were practiced in the name of a religion, a school of medicine, or even martial arts. That is why these exercises were practiced, developed and passed on by religious specialists who, like in the Indian case, were organized in religious networks of training and socialization, such as monasteries and other religious institutions. Spiritual and bodily exercises belonged to groups that in their very organization could be seen as militant. However, it seems that in China, the imperial state regarded them much more as a threat to state control than in India. At least the official documents of the Chinese state refer to them as “heterodox cults,” and forms of “White Lotus” opposition.^[15] There is therefore a long Chinese tradition to see these activities as threatening the order imposed by the state and its heavenly mandate.
In China, during the Republican period and in the Communist regime that followed it, science was the sign under which the nation and modernity were conceived. Historically this is first expressed clearly in the May 4th Movement of 1919 that saw itself as “already enlightened” and on the way to bringing secular enlightenment to the people of China. This gave rise to a number of campaigns in the 1920s and 1930s against religion. Temple land was appropriated by the Kuomintang government, and activists destroyed images and attacked temples and other religious institutions. All of this resembles the Boxer Uprising of the nineteenth century in its iconoclasm (although this similarity would be completely lost on the participants), but the main difference was that it was supported by a state that embraced Western science and rationalism. Where in India nationalists often saw it as their duty to protect religion against imperialism, in China nationalists saw religion as an obstacle in the modernization of Chinese society. Religion was seen as superstition, not as a traditional essence of Chinese culture. This attitude derived partly from a Confucian tradition of disdain for the popular, partly from Christian attacks against Chinese traditions, and largely from the great unifying power of the idea of science in modernity.
Although in 1917 Mao had written negatively about qi exercises as promoting tranquility and passivity, while he himself wanted to promote activity as essential for the survival of China, qi exercises did survive the attacks on traditionalism and feudalism by being aligned with science.^[16] In the 1950s qi exercises were growing part of a state-sanctioned medical science. In this way qi exercises came to be practiced by acknowledged physicians rather than by spiritual masters. Qigong therapy was thus taken out of the realm of superstition and into the realm of scientific clinics; and not only medical science, but physics and biology also conducted experiments focusing on the existence of qi. However, this scientific sanctification and purification of qigong did not result in total state control. This is partly inherent in the fact that traditional Chinese medicine, while claiming to be “scientific,” simultaneously claims to transcend the limitations of Western science. At the same time, it is a nationalist claim for the superiority of “Chineseness” that is difficult to attack by a state that promotes socialism with Chinese characteristics, as Deng Xiaoping called it. Outside of the control of the state was the spontaneous qigong craze of the 1980s in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution. People started to do qi exercises everywhere, and to some extent this can be read as setting the body free from the constraints imposed by the state and signifying a transition to greater individual freedom and interaction. The state tried to channel this spontaneous outburst of qigong activities into qigong institutions and movements, but some of them, most notably the Falun Gong or Falun Dafa, as it was called later, turned out to be a real challenge for state control.
In India modernity is also understood under the sign of science. However, the Indian discussions already in the nineteenth century emphasize the scientific nature of indigenous traditions. Secularist attacks on traditional religion are rare, while attempts to purify religion from so-called superstition and show the scientific foundations of religion are taken up by reformers in a number of proto-nationalist and nationalist movements. Rational religion, as a major current in these reform movements, offered a home to intellectuals who wanted to reflect on developments in science from Hindu traditions.
From Vivekananda’s pioneering work in the nineteenth century many offshoots have emerged. One clear direction is the same as taken by the Chinese, namely yoga mainly as a physical exercise (hatha-yoga) and a health practice that can be experimented with by medical science. Yoga is understood to be extremely healthy for the body and for the mind. Another clear direction is the creation of the healthy, strong masculinity for the Hindu nation. This is primarily the field of martial arts to which yoga practices can be linked. Like the Falun Gong in China, the religious organization of bodily disciplines in India can gain a political meaning. This is true for organizations like the Rasthriya Swayamsevak Sangh (a militant nationalist organization in which bodily discipline is central) and the related Vishwa Hindu Parishad that is organizing the various spiritual leaders and their movements under a common nationalist platform. These organizations are anti-secular and, since India is a democracy unlike China, are, politically, part of a nationalist party – the Bharatiya Janata Party that was able to rule India for ten years until the elections of 2004. Clearly, the democratic system in India is able to give a wide berth to nationalist movements that promote traditional practices together with a political agenda. At the same time one needs to observe that such Hindu nationalist movements strive for an Indian utopia that leaves little space for Muslims and Christians, and are deeply involved in widespread violence against minorities. It is this kind of violence in civil society that the Chinese Communist party in general has been able to control by repression.
A particularly interesting development in yoga is its alignment with the development of global capital. Since yoga was never seen as subversive by the powers that be, it became a recognized element in middle class religiosity. As such, it followed the trajectories of this class that became more and more transnational in its orientation during the 1960s. Its older connection with nationalism was not thereby forgotten or marginalized but utilized in identity politics in the countries of immigration, especially the United States. Indian spirituality is something to be proud of since many non-Indians are also attracted to it. The global reach of yoga was stimulated by groups, such as the Divine Life Society, founded by Sivananda, but can be best understood by the fact that its origins lie in an imperial modernity, mediated by the English language. From the English-speaking world (the number of practitioners reached thirteen million in the United States), yoga has spread even farther, making for four million yoga practitioners in Germany. In the 1960s yoga became part of the youth revolution that shook Western culture. Promoted by popular music groups like the Beatles, Indian spirituality became a lifestyle element that could be commodified and marketed in a variety of ways. In the West it became part of a complex of alternative therapies based on lifestyle and bodily exercise. In light of the therapeutic worldview that is part of global capitalism, it has now also come back to India in the new perceptions of Indian tradition by the urban middle class. Due to the opening up of the market for Eastern spirituality, not only yoga has benefited, but a variety of Chinese spiritual exercises such as taiji quan and qigong have also gained a transnational market
In Asia, under the influence of the imperial encounter and nationalism, the transformation of ancient disciplines of the body or disciplines of the self, as Marcel Mauss and Michel Foucault called them, has made yoga and qigong signs of Indian and Chinese tradition and modernity. One element of this complex story is that enlightened secular reason, which is another possible sign of modernity, has not become hegemonic. Attacks on religious traditions that are the discursive foundations of these disciplines of the self have been mounted with varying success both in India and in China. But in both cases, a politics of difference emerged that asserted a historical pride in one’s national civilization against imperial projects. The claim that traditions were forms of superstition and signs of backwardness and that modernity had to be scientific, could be responded to by a counter-claim that these traditions were in fact scientific when brought down to their very essence. Especially in the human encounter with the frailties of the flesh like disease and death, medical science clearly showed its limitations. It is thus particularly in concern for health that these practices come to compete with other forms of medicine, and are understood as a viable an alternative to Western medicine.
In both India and China, movements that propagate religious traditions, and especially alternative utopias, can have a political impact. While in India such movements became part of an in principle legitimate nationalist project (although some offshoots were quickly de-legitimized as “extremist”), in China such movements were under constant attack from both the Kuomintang and the Communists. In the postcolonial period it is really the liberalization of the Indian and Chinese economies under the impact of global capitalism that frees the energies of spiritual movements to organize civil society. This is very clear in the Chinese case where liberalization first gives space to a spontaneous qigong and later to the rise of movements like Falun Gong that connect qigong to older ideas of a moral and political nature. In India one can see this especially in the rise of a Hindu nationalism that rejects an earlier secular and multicultural project of the state by emphasizing Hindu traditions as the basis of Indian civilization, thereby excluding other contributions by religious minorities. It is especially a new-fangled urban religiosity that is both interested in yoga and in a strong nation that supports this kind of politics.