Where is Kandahar?
by N.K. Oberoi WHERE is Kandahar? I did not ask this question when the whole world was asking it during the hijacking of the Indian Airlines plane. I did it a week after the incident when I happened to be in a seminar on Making of a Nation or perhaps Nation in the Making: culture, literature and politics. It was a marathon discussion on the forms of nationalism, territorial cultural and civilisational, the forms of literature and politics. How did our nation come into existence and how is it continuing to exist; what is the difference in its colonial and post-colonial configurations? There were references to the European, the nationalist and the subaltern perspectives on nationalism. There were occasional references to the literature of the Dalits and the tribals and to the surfacing into national consciousness of the marginalised ones who had been so far kept outside the mainstream nationalism. I had all along been hoping that someone will bring up the hijacking incident. Does it not
