The story of maimed nationalisms

Hindustan Times

15-05-2025

'On your feet, Magyar,' wrote Sándor Petőfi, Hungary's national poet, 'the homeland calls'. So opens his iconic poem, Nemzeti Dal, or 'national song'. This line became the heartbeat of inspiration for the Hungarian Revolution against the Hapsburg Monarchy in 1848, a historic event that watchers of the Netflix show, The Empress may have relived recently. But the poet Petőfi himself never returned to his homeland. He died in one of the last battles of the revolution, his body never recovered.
As I stood before Petőfi tomb this Spring, my mind went blank, gaping with questions about nationalism and war, and the missing body of the martyr. In the heart of the famous Fiumei Road Graveyard in Budapest, the Petőfi family grave holds the remains of his family members, even those of his son – but the man who gave the nation these unforgettable lines of patriotism could not get back on his feet to return to his homeland. Unlike the great English Romantic poet, Lord Byron, who lost his life in his idealistic immolation in the Greek War of Independence but had his body returned to family vault at Hucknall Torkard in England, the Hungarian national poet remains a towering presence in his very gaping absence in his family tomb in Budapest's famous cemetery.
The nationalism of maimed nations is a powerful and dangerous thing. Located right in the core of Europe, Hungary has struggled against just about every current flowing through the continent, crushed by many, resilient against some. Overpowered by the mighty Ottoman Empire in the Middle Ages, dominated by the monumental Habsburg Monarchy in the 18th and the 19th centuries, oppressed by Nazism and eventually wrung dry by Soviet communism in the 20th, this is a nation that has been on a traumatised margins of Europe for an eternity. Now on its own after the fall of the Berlin wall, it has repeatedly reached back to the great linguistic and literary nationalisms of the 19th century, immortalised in the words of poets like Sándor Petőfi and Ferenc Kölcsey. But quickly, these invocations turned intolerant and jingoistic under the leadership of the Fidesz party, whose leader Viktor Orbán has proudly declared Hungary to be an 'illiberal democracy'. This state oppresses its own indigenous Roma gypsy community, fans hatred against immigrants, equates queer people with paedophiles, and bans Pride Marches. In its fervour to fight its oppressors, the oppressed has now turned oppressor.
Language, literature and music have long been witness and conscience to the nationalism of dominated nations. Deprived of voice and power in the realms of economy and statecraft, suppressed peoples have sung their longings through their bards. The force of their voices is no less than air-raid sirens that pierce through night skies, no less pervasive than the blanket blackouts that blind cities and countries. But what happens when the voice of the traumatised drowns out the voices beneath themselves? That has, historically been the destiny of maimed nationalisms – that they fight by maiming others less privileged than them, whose cries they cannot hear, deafened as they are by their own trauma. Literature has borne witness to such uneven struggles beautifully. When Irish nationalism at the turn of the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries claimed the Celtic twilight to sing the beauty of Gaelic peasantry and their myths and legends, it equated its nation with the identity of the Celt, excluding diverse groups that had come to call Ireland home at that time.
This was the great literary nationalism of WB Yeats, Lady Gregory, JM Synge, whose poems and plays celebrated the myths and legends of Ireland against the oppressive impact of British colonialism. But fighting its own battle against imperialism, Celtic Ireland had no place for the Jewish people who called it home and brazenly paved the way for anti-Semitism as part of its nationalistic identity. Against the chroniclers of lyric poetry and poetic plays, the arch-modern novelist and chronicler of the contemporary James Joyce crafted his great novel Ulysses with an ordinary Jewish ad-canvassor, Leopold Bloom as its protagonist – its striking mock-hero, if you will. Joyce found the nationalism of the Celtic twilight suffocating and provincial, and intolerant enough to exclude outsiders. Hence his novelistic vision of twentieth century Ireland parted company of the lyricism of the poems and plays that sought to celebrate its past and mythical glories.
War cries on the battlefield have inevitably drawn out flowing, rivers of words and music – in print, performance, and now on social media. That is the nature of humanity under the crushing force of attack and oppression. The will to live and thrive creates poetry and performance of a kind that refuses to be throttled. But this will is also of a blinded and blinding kind that refuses to see anything else. The two world wars in Europe saw a flood of patriotic poems and songs that eventually turned into dirges for dying soldiers whose death, in the end, felt utterly meaningless. No better picture than the quick path from the patriotic poetry of Rupert Brooke to the existentialist, even nihilistic poetry of Wilfred Owen, who died in the trenches at the age of twenty-five. But shortly before the English fought the Germans in Europe, they crushed the Afrikaaners, or the Boers – the Dutch-derived people of South Africa in the deadly violence of the Anglo-Boer War of 1902, where they organised the world's first concentration camps – even before the Nazis perfected the science of these death-traps in the second world war. The English maimed and tortured Boer women and children in the concentration camps of the Anglo-Boer war, eventually forcing the Boers to a crushing surrender.
What was the result of that crushing defeat? The Boers, forever a second-tier white race in South Africa below the sophisticated, capitalist imperialism of the English, realised that there was nothing but their white skin that kept them from the bare-bones poverty and trauma of the Bantu tribes, the racially mixed 'coloured' people, and the descendants of indentured labourers from Asia. Hurting from their own pain and humiliation, they came up with an aggressive nationalism that, in the name of celebrating their Afrikaaner identity, erected one of the most divisive and unequal social systems ever known to humanity. This was Aparthood in English, in Afrikaans, Apartheid – different rules of life, location, movement, education, marriage, family, property, everything, for different races classified under law. Come into existence in 1948, when the whole world was getting ready for decolonisation movements and soon, into the Civil Rights movements, this system of great inequality lasted through most of the 20th century, only to come to an end in 1994. It wasn't with no reason that Nelson Mandela's striking biography was called The Long Walk to Freedom. When I walked along Robben Island, off the coast of Cape Town a couple of years back, from Mandela's tiny cell to the shores of freedom, the magnitude and weight of that shackled walk shook me to the core. That too, was the consequence of a subaltern nationalism running rogue, casting death, destruction, and torture on everybody beneath them.
Having lived and worked in close historical proximity of many of these toxic nationalisms that started as legitimate struggles against oppression, I feel deeply troubled by my eroding faith in nationalism itself. The Quebecois nationalism, in the French province of Quebec, against the dominance of English Canada is another one I experienced in close quarters during my years in that country. The Quebecois could see their own marginalisation clearly enough, but were blind to the oppression they carried out to the indigenous peoples right in their midst, people who had stakes in neither English nor French Canada. But who cared about them, and who listened to their languages?
There is nothing like our own trauma and suffering to blind us to the suffering of others. At a moment of intensity, one cannot but have empathy for this blindness. But it is the work of song, words, and narratives to bring out the layers of complexities within suffering. This is why the sound of music and poetry, in the long run, outlasts the piercing cry of blackout sirens. The sirens over our heads is loud. But the poems will last longer, and will celebrate those whose souls are carried away by bombs. The empty presence of the national poet in the Petőfi family grave holds more than the thousands of bodies buried all through the Fiumei Road Graveyard.
A novelist and critic, Saikat Majumdar is currently a Senior Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study in Budapest.