Conclusions
As a prominent "sign of the modern," and hence irrevocably linked to
the nation-state, history has been implicated as the necessary condition
both in hegemony and in struggle in India, that is, both in the constitu-
tion of anthropological cultures of the precolonial past and in the freedom
struggle. This "sinuous and subtle relational field of colonial hegemony"
displaced Indian subjectivity and agency in relation to everything but its
own presence and concealed its refiguration of the categories and logics
of Indian social life.^1 Instead of freeing history from such "modernized
modalities,"^2 most of the Indian nationalisms tended to be "derivative
discourses," and the postcolonial Indian state adopted the very colonial
mentality by internalizing the "intimate enemy."^3
Indian nationalisms, as Gyanendra Pandey contends, have been played
out over the last hundred years between the poles of modernization and
cultural identity. While the former agenda has been more and more clearly
specified over the decades, the latter, which was crucial to the national-
ist campaign from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries, has
been accorded less and less attention. Although India had come to be seen
as a composite society of Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Parsis, and
others toward the end of the nineteenth century, it was only in the 1920s
that the people of India were seen as the real ground to build up Indian
nationalism and the national movement. The Gandhian and Nehruvian
focus on the masses of India led on in the 1930s and thereafter to a social-
ist thrust in Indian nationalism with equal importance to social and eco-
nomic independence along with political swaraj.^4