90 "Presenting" the Past
level, there was the "real" India, to be found in the three pillars of the
"self-regulating" Indian society—the joint family, caste, and village—that
enabled India to withstand instability in the broader polity. This "defence
of the old order" revealed a mixture of conservatism with local variants
of Utopian socialist and Luddite postures. At the middle level, the urban
and the rural propertied middle classes were divided. The landed peas-
ants were happy to see the demise of the aristocracy, but the village-based
agrarian order remained to be dealt with in terms of major social trans-
formations. The urban industrial-professional classes, on the other hand,
were critical of both aristocratic conservatism and villagism. It must be
noted here that similar to the absence of "lords temporal," there were no
"lords spiritual," as Hinduism had no organized church to act as a focal
point for religious conservatism. However, the British presence affected
the outlook of various classes and the pattern of the interclass relations.
Erdman concludes that as the nationalist movement progressed in the
twentieth century, the aristocracy increasingly aligned with the British,
and the urban industrial and professional class increasingly joined hands
with the Congress, and this situation forestalled any fascist-type alliance
between them.^74
Notwithstanding the fact that he fails to understand the complicated
Gandhi-Congress relationship, A. R. Desai completes the picture with his
analysis. Although the Congress had a declared objective of establishing
Ramarajya, it liquidated the "princely-monarchic order of which Rama
was considered the doyen during its progressive phase" and ushered in
"a new era of the non-monarchist bourgeois republican political order in
India." Because of its "peculiar origin, belated arrival and weak histori-
cal position," the Indian bourgeoisie never evolved or elaborated secular,
rationalist, or materialist philosophies during either British or postin-
dependence periods. Being a byproduct of imperialist capitalism rather
than that of a struggle against feudalism, including feudal religion, Indian
capitalism did not have to dislodge the prevailing feudal and prefeudal
philosophies. The overall global capitalism was also on a declining phase,
with the ruling bourgeoisie in capitalist countries abandoning rationalist
and materialist urges for religio-mystical outlooks. As a result, the Indian
bourgeoisie built up a secular bourgeois democratic state with modern
scientific, technological, and liberal democratic education, but remained
revivalist in the cultural field by choosing "Bharat" as the name of the
country, in tune with its old Hindu tradition; Sanskritized Hindi as the
national language; and pre-Muslim national symbols such as the Dharma
Chakra to resurrect the cultural values of the pre-Muslim past and so
forth.^75 When all is said and done, the ideological trend at the wake of
independence was far from clear, and a neat categorization of socioeco-
nomic groups or political parties with right or left doctrinal strands was
even farther away as there were many and important variations.