Speaking the Nation: The Oratorical Making of Secular, Neoliberal India [Hardcover]

Untangling the logical, lexical, and semantic patterns of the multiple official speeches of Indian prime ministers, Speaking the Nation gauges how the Indian state has been projected by different governments in different times, in the face of challenges from internal and external actors that put pressure on its leaders to safeguard their status as legitimate elites in power.Untangling the logical, lexical, and semantic patterns of the multiple official speeches of Indian prime ministers, Speaking the Nation gauges how the Indian state has been projected by different governments in different times, in the face of challenges from internal and external actors that put pressure on its leaders to safeguard their status as legitimate elites in power. It analyses how Indian nationhood is consistently reshaped and reaffirmed by invoking its secular ethos and practice, as well as the experience of market liberalization. The book calls for serious engagement with political oratory in India. A close reading of speeches since 1991--from Narasimha Rao to Narendra Modi--captured how, through these crosscutting topics, the prominent 'authors of the nation' and the 'vanguards of the state', speak India into being.PrefaceAcknowledgementsIntroduction1. The Prime Minister's Legacy and Traditions of Public Speech in India2. Time and Temporalizing Tactics I: Of Futures to Come and Futures Past3. Time and Temporalizing Tactics II: Of Iconic Past(s) and Good Times4. 'The World Is Changing ' : Othering and Spatializing Strategies5. Speaking the Nation 'Secular': Elaborately Explicit, Strategically SilentConclusionBibliographyIndexAbout the AuthorAnandita Bajpai,Department of South Asian Studies, Institute for Asian and African Studies, Humboldt-UniversityAnandita Bajpai teaches at the Department for South Asian Studies, Institute for Asian and African Studies, Humboldt University, and is a research fellow at the Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient, Berlin, Germany.