Abstract:
Throughout the several years I have spent living and working in India, I have heard many times the emphatic assertion by people from all walks of life that ‘there is a village somewhere in India where everyone speaks Sanskrit’. I resolved that one day I would substantiate the veracity of these claims. As an anthropologist, the way in which rumours like this grow and take on a life of their own, indirectly feeding a nationalist and romantic image of ‘pure, untouched and pristine’ village life in rural India, fascinate me. Professionally, I am interested in the macro-level processes of creating imagined communities, and how this manifests at the micro or interpersonal level. The construction of our collective ideas regarding any community or nation is based on a tacitly agreed-upon imaginary landscape.
Details / PDF:
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