Civilizational Resilience & National Renewal
Identity & Heritage. Nation-building, identity and continuity in two post-colonial states.
India and Israel emerged within a year of each other from the end of British rule. Both inherited deep civilisational traditions and the practical task of forging modern political community out of them. Neither founding was uncontested, and each carried into independence a population that did not share a single religious, linguistic or ethnic identity.
This pillar studies the comparative history of those national projects. It treats nation-building, diasporic identity, and the relationship between civilisational tradition and constitutional democracy as live and serious subjects. The Jewish communities of India, Bene Israel, Cochin and Baghdadi, carry continuous histories of approximately two thousand years and remain the empirical anchor for much of the comparative work in this domain. The modern Indian community in Israel adds a contemporary register to the same conversation.
The comparative work has been under-attempted by existing scholarship, partly because the parallel is sharper than the common framings allow. Jawaharlal Nehru's vision of a plural Indian republic and David Ben-Gurion's vision of a Jewish democratic state share more, on close reading, than either national historiography has tended to acknowledge.