This paper examines nationalism as the ‘modern idea of a collective’ or the ‘ideal of a modern collective’ that struts out universally and that ceaselessly tightens its footwear in the face of recalcitrant gravels, gravels that are representative of either extant or possible ideas of alternative collectivity. Against this background, we show how a new nationalism in India encapsulated by the economic Utopia of ‘inclusive development’ is emerging in the contemporary landscape of global capitalism under neoliberal conditions. This Utopia is shown to be marked by a fundamental split that helps secure and facilitate the reorganization of India's national cartography into the ‘expanding circuits of global capital’ and its constitutive outside: ‘world of the third’. Highlighted are the encounters with flashpoints of conflict emanating from nationalism's intricate encounter with the contemporary ‘gravel in the shoe’: world of the third.