Post Colonial Critique of Sara Suleri's Meatless Days.
Before the development of Nationalism, people were generally loyal to a city or a particular leader rather than to their nation. Encyclopedia Britannica (vol.no.viii.2009) identifies that the movement has genesis with the late 18th century’s American and French revolutions. Other historians point specifically to the rise of ultra-nationalist party in France during French revolution. The term was coined by Johann Gottfried Herder during the late 1770s. (Smith) The emergence of the notion of Nationalism is often connected with the French revolution of 1789, when the first “nation-state”(p 98) is said to have been created. Although states where the boundaries of the state and the nation coincide have existed earlier, before 1789 states had not used the situation to their advantage to the extent that France was able to. It was here that nationalism entered as such a powerful idea. Since then, Nationalism has become one of the most significant, political and social forces in history, perhaps most notably as a major postulate of World War 1 and specially World War II. (Blanning) Philosopher A.C.Gralying describes nation as an artificial construct, “their boundaries drawn in the blood of past wars.”(78) He argues that there is no country of the world which is not home to more than one different culturally co-existing culture (Grayling). Nationalism has been defined by its critics as a divisive, incoherent,unstable and incoherently weak discourse. In the first instance the very notion of nationalism is considered to be oppressive as an individual loses his distinctive individual identity within the folds of wider national identity. This in turn provides the political elite with potential opportunities to control and manipulate the masses. Bhabha, in his essay “Dissemination: Time, Narrative and Margins”, has defined discourse of nationalism as highly unstable and inherently weak for the reason that it is unable to produce the unity it promises. He is of the view