In the pre-modern world, ‘love of the land’ meant an emotional attachment to a piece of territory that provided food. Nothing else mattered much beyond this territory to the owner of the land.

Those who did not own such land, desired to own one, and often worked the land for the owner. To the owner-farmers and their peasant-workers, their village was their world. None of them had any emotional bond with what lay outside the village. Nor were they expected to. The monarchs simply needed them as taxpayers.

On the other hand, people who were not farmers or peasants were nomads. They moved in groups, looking for pastures for their animals and lands which they could plunder. They rarely stayed there. They organised themselves into different tribes. Stronger tribes swallowed weaker ones and the former grew large enough to attack and plunder settled villages.

Eventually, many nomadic conquerors began to settle down and work the land. They realised that, without doing this, they could not sustain their existence. Tall walls and stronger castles had begun to go up around settled lands, and monarchs started to build robust armies to keep out the raiding nomads.

History shows that irrational, unrestrained nationalism peppered with messianic myths often takes a nasty turn, leading to hatred, violence and even genocides

Once settled, they too developed a devotional relationship with the lands on which they grew food to eat and trade. To them as well, love of the land meant a love of the ground on which they grew food. But one did not have to be born there to love it.

Germanic tribes loved the lands that they conquered, settled and cultivated in non-Germanic regions. Arab tribes exhibited love for lands that they had conquered outside Arabia. Even Romans gradually began to found beloved new capitals in lands outside Italy. Home was where the heart was. And the heart was where the food was. There was no nostalgia, really, for lands that people were born in and moved out from, or for the grounds they had roamed on as nomads.

The iconic image of the Indian actress Nargis raising a fistful of soil in the 1957 Bollywood classic Mother India is an exhibition of the love of the land. However, it is love for India as a national whole, not just the land that she worked on as a peasant. Yet, this image’s roots lie in a pre-modern sentiment. But its enactment by Nargis was modern, because it was exhibiting nationalism, and nationalism is a modern construct.

The idea of nationalism was born in the 17th century in Europe. It was about people with a shared language, religion and territory organising themselves as a nation. It was an antithesis of monarchism, which was universal in the sense that an invader would conquer and settle in an alien territory and begin to call it home.

There were no nations in the pre-modern world. Just kingdoms, with the larger ones stretching for thousands of miles and including people of different faiths, languages and races. Among the people, there was no sense of a shared love of the empire outside one’s own agricultural domain.

The idea of nationalism was largely developed by landless but educated men who were traders, businessmen, lawyers, teachers, doctors, etc. They were looking to find a place for themselves in the corridors of power dominated by the Church, aristocrats and monarchs. Democracy, capitalism, human rights and secularism were products of this endeavour. At the core of it was what began to be described as modernity.

By the early 20th century, modernity had almost completely reshaped pre-modern ideas. Nations had become nation-states. Then, when these nation-states began to absorb peoples from different faiths, races and languages, the nation-state became the common entity that was to be venerated and loved by all, no matter what their racial/ethnic and religious disposition.

Even states which looked to transcend nationalism through more universal ideologies, such as communism or Islamism, became nationalistic in character. Arab nationalism dominated various Muslim-majority countries in the Middle East. Communists in China continued calling China a motherland, and the Soviet Union never stopped the usage of the term ‘Mother Russia’.

But nation-states not very comfortable with the more inclusive and multicultural aspects that nationalism had developed, formulated a nationalism which is often called ‘invidious nationalism’.

The Croatian philosopher Nenad Miscevi defines it as, “nationalism without brakes”. The love for country it demands is unrestrained, devoid of any kind of universalistic considerations.

Even though the creation of myths is an integral part of formulating a nationalism, in ‘normal’ nation-states, the myths are now allowed to be dispassionately scrutinised. According to the British political theorist David Miller, such myths are deliberate inventions made to serve a political purpose. National identities cannot survive critical reflection. If one applies to them normal canons of rationality, they are revealed to be fraudulent.

Many nation-states have overcome this fear. But in those that haven’t, ‘invidious nationalism’ has intensified. Here, questioning nationalistic myths can be seen as an unpatriotic, even treacherous, act.

Fascist ideologies which came to power in Germany and Italy in the first half of the 20th century are still the most prominent examples of ‘invidious nationalism’. However, this strand of nationalism mushroomed again with great force in the 1990s, especially in the Balkans. New nation-states emerged after the break-up of Yugoslavia, and some vicious nationalist myths that seemed to have eroded sped to the surface again, causing gruesome massacres during wars between different ethnic groups who now had their own little nation-states.

‘Invidious nationalism’ is also fuelled by messianic myths which see a nation as a chosen people to ‘defend’ a particular faith. Messianic myths of this nature were common among European Christians in the early years of nationalism. They were also prominent during the Balkan conflicts of the 1990s.

Pakistan adopted ‘invidious nationalism’ after it violently lost its eastern wing in 1971. Messianic myths that had been on the fringes of Pakistani nationalism were brought into the mainstream, and the country began to be explained as a ‘bastion of Islam’.

Messianic myths are now often mouthed by Pakistani political leaders. Imran Khan has been the most prominent exponent of these myths recently, posing as a defender of Islam from Islamophobia and ‘Westernisation’. Interestingly, India too has adopted ‘invidious nationalism’. PM Modi’s regime is using it to undermine the country’s more pluralistic Indian nationalism and replace it with Hindu nationalism, complete with messianic myths.

According to Miscevi, “invidious nationalism gets very nasty in practice.” It often leads to persecution of minorities, and even to systematic genocides. It should be done away with.

Published in Dawn, EOS, August 21st, 2022