tradition et technology

Nationalism constructed on the pride of a country’s advancing technology is an interesting and strange sentiment to understand. As Subramaniam eexplores the revival of Vedic sciences, or rather more appropriate, the hybridity of an archaic modernity, the dangers of establishing ‘hinduness’ in India as the dominate cultural ideology, which attempts to embraces development via technology, negates social tensions of caste, gender, and race symptomatic of dominant discourses.

Yet, this rhetoric of nationalism is a familiar argument for progress and development, often a competitive response to the rest of the post industrial world, at the cost of human rights. Such is a utopian sentiment of blinding optimism disinterested in the apparent contradictions and inconsistencies it presents. A visual illustration of such “nationalist spirit” is typified as the formal motif in socialist realist art. Below is a Chinese propaganda poster promoting communist prospects of scientific advancement with a caption reading: ‘Science can be dangerous and difficult; bitter struggles can set new standards”.


(1979)

Below is an earlier image poster distributed during the “Great leap Forward” campaign. The sails bear the slogan, “Better, Faster, Cheaper”, while Europeans and Americans welter in the waves on the right.



Juxtaposed to one another, the nationalism these posters present reflects the authority of tradition and the enthusiasm of the new, similar to what Subramaniam portrays in her portrait of an archaic modern India. That is, both attempt to modernize with a façade of “culture and tradition”. That science in India is “distinctively Hindu”, or communism to Moa is “clearly Chinese”, such blatant ethnic characterizing blurs the lines of national and cultural identities. Thus, the irony of a janus-faced nationalism of nostalgia and progress is that modernization is legitimized by the authority of tradition, that celebrates a future liberation via technology, without dismissing ostracizing via tradition. Thus oppositions are met by a combined rhetoric of science and tradition