Thinking the Nation Out non than earlier theses suggested. (ii) a dissatisfaction with conceptual inheritances: liberal and marxist, which make clear distinctions between reactionary and progressive and assign nationalism to one or the other category; with some theorists—a questioning of the Enlightenment ideal of progress itself. (iii) the conviction that any study of nationalism would have to reckon with 'the decisive and specific logic of the colonial situation'.1 In other words ^ each of these studies marks itself off from earlier ones because they attempt to theorize the colonial context in which nationalism emerged as much as they theorize nationalism itself. (iv) a serious attentiveness to the nation as a cultural project and to the politics of culture/ideology. (v) a turning back, in quite a few of these studies, to the colonial period, in search, not of a comprehensive or correct understanding of the past per se, but of the nineteenth century agendas which maintain a continuing hold on contemporary ones. The past, then, not as a living tradition one must reconnect with, or a crippling inheritance to be laid aside, or even as a definite stage to be transcended, but as a hidden history of structural and discursive determinations which stealthily deflect, reappropriate and even control contemporary initiative. The critical and interrogative relationship with the past that these studies inaugurate signals possibilities unthinkable earlier; without always intending it, we have covered a significant distance over the ruts of theory. That on the one hand. On the other we are faced with a fever pitch at which the cultural forces of the nation state are being marshalled, reshaped and reallocated to new uses. Education, scholarship, the family, film, TV, advertising, the arts, religious revivals, sexuality, leisure, indeed a whole range of institutions concur to recreate a 'national' subjectivity. As the third world markets open up for international capital, a new Indian is being prepared. I want in this paper to look more closely at two efforts to remake theory in modes that might be of use to the tasks at hand: Sumit Sarkar's re-reading of Rammohan Roy and the Bengal Renaissance and Partha Chatterjee's study of nationalist thought.2 One might easily cite a dozen scholars and an equal number of artists whose work has made significant contribution to the re-reading of nationalism. But Sarkar and Chatterjee are interesting because while both function within a marxist framework and represent attempts to renovate it, each uses a very different kind of theoretical initiative. It is not without significance that both theorists have sought to extend their frameworks to an understanding of patriarchy in colonial India. I look back to them as a co-worker, thinking my slow way through earlier gestures, as I fashion tools and strategies more appropriate to the problem which currently engages me—that of historicizing representations of gender. Journal of Arts <& Ideas