(Aunindyo Chakravarty is senior managing editor, NDTV India and NDTV Profit)
When my daughter was about two years old, she started to get a sense of the locality where we stay. She could name it and distinguish it from other places in the city. Yet, it was almost impossible to explain to her that all of these residential enclaves were part of a city called Delhi, or that Delhi and Kolkata were both part of a country called India.
It was only when she went to school and learnt to look at maps that she could grasp the concept of the nation. That is, more or less, how most of us learnt our nationalism - from maps printed in NCERT textbooks. Gradually, we learnt to recognise other symbols of the nation - the flag, coins, and other things taught in our civics classes.
As we grew older, there were other less obvious practices and rituals through which we lived our national culture. These ranged from cricket matches to classical music. Each of these material symbols, rituals and practices combined in complex ways to make up our sense of being Indian - our nationalism.
Our sense of India is also constructed through its difference from other alien cultures. These cultures are present in our mind only as their representations - as symbols and signs. Names of languages, scripts, flags, attire, coins, cricket teams, food, are all different kinds of symbols and signs that define the self and the other.
It is a deliberate identification of Biryani with Pakistan and terrorism. But the target is neither Pakistan, nor terrorism. The real target is at home, the so-called eaters of Biryani - the Indian Muslim. It is, in effect, an identification of food habits with terror and an attempt to say that those who eat Biryani are traitors.
We need to guard against these images, because if we let them define our public discourse they might soon start defining our nationalism.
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