Since the works of Ernest Gellner and Benedict Anderson, it has been conventional to think of nations and nationhood as things "invented" or "imagined" into being. With the works of subaltern historians, we have come also to recognize the activities of imagining the nation are never the exclusive or uncontested preserve of a single political agency or social class.

In this roundtable, we look at visual representations in the varied historical and contemporary constructions of nationhood in South Asia during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. While most scholarly considerations of nationalism in South Asia up to now have focused primarily on verbal constructions, we contend that projects of national imagining are often carried out as much through a visual vocabulary of images. The roundtable offers an opportunity to discuss recent research in a variety of visual media, including print lithography, fine arts, film, religious festivals and public spectacles, and the geography of public space. We will consider both official iconographies of politically central groups and the unofficial or contestatory visual representations of groups that place themselves outside that dominant visual culture.