Songs of nation-building: a deliberation on selected nationalist songs telecast by Doordarshan from the 1980s to the 2020s

This research article studies selected songs telecast by Doordarshan, the national channel from the 1980s to the 2020s to understand the representational politics of India's national culture. It explores how the national culture has been imagined and propagated by the state-owned channel by adopting a comparative focus on the selected songs. The discussion is foregrounded on Partha Chatterjee's theory of 'the spiritual' domain which is at the core of the national identity for a postcolonial nation. The article also attempts to understand the dynamic nature of India's national culture and how its transformation can be read from the songs.