Nations and Silences: Specters of Subaltern Space

This article analyzes the initial steps in nationalist project in India – the creation of national space and time, which help to lay foundations of a Nation. What is being analyzed here in the case of India prior the independence, and the space which is not a traditional one, but not modern either. This space is displaced from the active nationalist discourse, but at the same time it is needed on the unconscious level. Homi K. Bhabha’s third space theory can help grasping the spatial con gurations of nationalist space, and the effects of nationalist imagination on the subaltern, provided that such space is not a hybrid one. It can be called a non-space, located in no-time. Deepa Mehta’s lm “Water” is taken as providing a critique of nationalist subalternization of society. The aim of the article is to show the subalternization process as on the one hand necessary for the forging of a nation, and on the other – as demonstrating the ambivalence of this ideology in the face of idealism and reality. The article shows how nationalism encodes the past and gives roles to its subject, especially the subaltern subjects. In analyzing this initial step of nationalism it is possible to create a strategy for the critique of this deeply ambiguous ideology.