Imagining India: The Nation as a Brand

• Main Author: Mehta-Karia, Sheetal
• Other Authors: Delhi, Kari
• Language: en_ca
• Published: 2011
• Subjects: Neocolonial governmentality; nation branding; Brand India; 0340
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/1807/30097

This thesis critically analyzes the phenomenon of nation branding as a technique of neocolonial governmentality. The study focuses on Brand India - postcolonial India’s attempt to imagine the nation and its people through the discourse of branding. I argue that India’s nation branding exercise hollows out the postcolonial imagination so that the nation can now only be imagined through a language and within a framework ‘always-already’ constituted for the postcolony. This thesis builds on Michel Foucault’s analysis of governmentality and utilizes a postcolonial framework, to show that when the practice of nation branding is applied to a postcolonial nation, it works to reinscribe the colonial legacy and reaffirm colonial power relations