We offer a political‐economic, postcolonial interrogation of nation branding based on the Incredible India campaign. We show how the discursive violence inherent in nation branding promotes internal hegemonies and external market interests at the expense of cosmopolitan ideas of belonging and community. In Incredible India, colonial identities are reinscribed, peripheralizing India in line with the demands of global markets, privileging Western desires and imagination. Internal political hegemonies promoting India as a Hindu nation are also reflected in the campaign, marginalizing minority groups. However, the attempt to construct a unitary nation simultaneously reveals the presence of the “other,” contesting the narrative's boundaries. The analysis confirms nation branding as a fundamentally political process, implicated in the production and perpetuation of inequalities.

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The Asian Youth Movements (AYMs) of the 1970s and 1980s were powerful examples of political movements influenced by black politics and a version of secularism that became a unifying force between different religious communities. Drawing on interviews with participants in the youth movements and material collected together for the ‘Tandana-Glowworm’ digitised archive of AYM ephemera, the author contextualises the AYMs in the political history of Asians in Britain, analyses their distinctive political stance and describes the leaflets, magazines and posters which they produced. The legacy of the AYMs, it is argued, lies in their example of organising politically at the grass roots across religious divides.

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