“Beyond Belief makes for a riveting read, and it is to Roy’s credit that she is able to weave a consuming narrative out of source materials that must have often been rather dreary and bureaucratic. . . . The book will be useful to a wide audience . . . [and is] an essential read for anyone who is interested in theories of nationalism.” — Varuni Bhatia, Journal of Asian Studies
“[Roy] shows that there is more to Indian national identity than the themes of the independence movement . . . . Her analysis of the Republic Day parade will strike a chord of recognition with anyone who has ever been in New Delhi on January 26.” — Lucian W. Pye, Foreign Affairs
“Srirupa Roy . . . has written an engaging and incisive study of the nation-building project in India. . . . Roy’s book is a welcome and original investigation into the origin and means of the national imagination of India.” — Simona Vittorini, Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism,
“Srirupa Roy’s Beyond Belief is a superb contribution to the study of postcolonial nationalism and the complex lives of the postcolonial Indian nation-state. . . . [T]he book is an excellent and invaluable addition to the literature on Indian nationalism and the Indian nation-state as well as an important contribution to theories of nationalism, the state, and nation-state, and postcolonial studies. Lucid and concise, the book is extremely well written. Different methodological and disciplinary perspectives are employed in the text with rigor and carefulness to enrich one another.” — Rohit Chopra, H-Nationalism, H-Net Reviews,
“This book is a welcome addition to the literature on the culture of politics in India, and charts new territory by foregrounding the state in the discussions surrounding the nation. By forcing us to look at the historically contingent nature of the ways in which the nation and the state have been co-produced and co-constituted in post-colonial India (and the contradictions inherent in such a process), it offers us a way out of the arid theoretical discussions surrounding the so-called post-colonial condition.” — Sailen Routray, Contemporary South Asia
“Srirupa Roy offers fresh, innovative, and highly original perspectives on how the Indian nation-state set out to manufacture a national modernity and new ways of presenting itself. This is a much needed contribution to a critical assessment of the now quasi-mythical Nehruvian decades of postcolonial state formation from one of the best political scientists writing on India today.” — Thomas Blom Hansen, University of Amsterdam
“This book marks a departure in the study of Indian nationalism. Srirupa Roy’s idea that nationalism works not as a ‘belief’ but through practices that seek to ground the state deeply in the life of the people, is demonstrated here by archival and ethnographic explorations of specific sites: rituals and pageantry of the state, official newsreels and documentaries, planned scientific institutions and industrial cities. The result is fine-grained political analysis enriched at every turn by the author’s judicious use of history and ethnography.” — Dipesh Chakrabarty, author of Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies