Gathering Points: Blood Donation and the Scenography of ‘National Integration’ in India JACOB COPEMAN Abstract This article explores nationalist interpretations of blood donation activity, examining how some Indians read integrative messages into the practical procedures through which blood is donated and distrib- uted. The first post-Independence Prime Minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru, proclaimed the need for ‘national integration’ as a bulwark against a myriad of linguistic, caste and ethnic agitations that threatened to disrupt the unity of the newly formed nation-state. This article shows that a striking manifestation of the Nehruvian ideology of national integration possesses a compelling presence in the Indian blood donation milieu. Scholars of India have long been preoccupied with documenting attempts by the Hindu right to redefine the nation in exclusively Hindu, anti-Nehruvian terms. Questioning the prevailing assumption that the only thing that counts politically in India today is the debunking or overriding of Nehruvian ideals of the secular inclusive nation, this article rehabilitates Nehruvianism as an important ethnographic subject. In so doing it demonstrates the roles of anonymity, enumeration and an array of technical and imaginative gathering points in the formation of the ‘difference-traversing gift’. The article also highlights ways in which technology may be employed for the imagining of social diversity. Keywords anonymity, blood donation, enumeration, India, nationalism, Nehru, transfusion The setting is a gleaming new charitable blood bank on the outskirts of Delhi. A delegation from the Taiwanese blood service is visiting the blood bank as part of an itinerary connected to its attendance of a conference of the International Society of Blood Transfusion, which is being staged in a five-star hotel nearby in Body & Society © 2009 SAGE Publications (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore and Washington DC), Vol. 15(2): 71–99 DOI: 10.1177/1357034X09103438 www.sagepublications.com 04 Copeman 103438R 1/5/09 3:50 pm Page 71