National and Postnational in Indian Premier League

With reference to your illuminating section on the postnational condition (EPW, 7 March 2009), Aditya Nigam, for instance, proposes a route (“Empire, Nation and Minority Cultures…”) steering clear of both Arjun Appadurai’s “postnation” and Partha Chatterjee’s “within the nation”.

Actually at the existential level the matter is quite simple. As the decision to stage the Indian Premier League cricket matches outside India neatly illustrates, in our times the “outside” and “within the nation” coexist; the former is keyed to de-territorialised global capitalism and the latter to state-bound nationalism. Holding a cricketing series not in India but outside the country (a decision at the drop of the hat, as it were) shows the postnational face while the constraint not to hold it in India due to security concerns in the time of general elections is a strong affirmation of the sovereign democratic nation state. This to my mind is the dominant irony of the postnational condition.