A nation is to a great extent an ‘imagined community’, held together by the collective beliefs, aspirations and imaginations of its members. It is based on certain assumptions which people make about the collective whole with which they identify.

The assumptions are:

(i)Shared beliefs

(ii)History

(iii)Territory

(iv)Shared political ideals

(v)Common Political Identity

A nation is constituted by belief:  

Nations are not like mountains, rivers or buildings which we can see and feel. They are not things which exist independent of the beliefs that people have about them. To speak of a people as a nation is not to make a comment about their physical characteristics or behaviour. Rather, it is to refer to the collective identity and vision for the future of a group which aspires to have an independent political existence. To this extent, nations can be compared with a team.

When we speak of a team, we mean a set of people who work or play together and, more importantly, conceive of themselves as a collective group. If they did not think of themselves in this way they would cease to be a team and be simply different individuals playing a game or undertaking a task. A nation exists when its members believe that they belong together.

People who see themselves as a nation also embody a sense of continuing historical identity. That is, nations perceive themselves as stretching back into the past as well as reaching into the future. They articulate for themselves a sense of their own history by drawing on collective memories, legends, historical records, to outline the continuing identity of the nation.

Thus nationalists in India invoked its ancient civilisation and cultural heritage and other achievements to claim that India has had a long and continuing history as a civilisation and that this civilisational continuity and unity is the basis of the Indian nation.

Jawaharlal Nehru, for instance, wrote in his book The Discovery of India, “Though outwardly there was diversity and infinite variety among the people, everywhere there was that tremendous impress of oneness, which held all of us together in ages past, whatever political fate or misfortune had befallen us”.