D Susie Tharu II Sumit Sarkar's 1972 essay, 'Rammohun Roy and the Break with the Past is itself a break with earlier Renaissance studies. His intervention came at a point when the broad consensus of loyalist, nationalist and marxist assessment regarded Ram-mohun Roy as representing the inaugural moment of 'progressive' thought in India. Sarkar argues that Rammohun's break with tradition remained 'deeply contradictory'. It was, he shows, elitist: 'Brahmoism... failed to make any attempt to link up with the popular lower-caste monotheistic cults which seem to have been fairly 83 numerous in eighteenth century Bengal'.3 It was not secular, but Hindu: despite the influence of Islamic rationalism on his first work, Tuhfat-ul-Muwahhidin, Ram-mohun became increasingly 'alienated from the Islamic heritage' and endorsed the British orientalist thesis of Muslim tyranny.4 Politically, Rammohun accepted a 'free trader logic' and envisaged the growth of a full-fledged bourgeoisie in Bengal functioning in close collaboration with British merchants and entrepreneurs. It was, Sarkar concludes, an 'absurd illusion', for colonial subjection could never allow more than a 'weak and distorted' caricature of 'full-blooded' bourgeois modernity. The complexity (or, given the neat separations of the Whig' paradigm, the contradiction) Sarkar uncovers through empirical research forces a re-reading of the nineteenth century. To represent Rammohun, as both liberal and marxist historigra-phy has tended to, simply as progressive is 'to kick the grosser facts of imperialist political and economic exploitation' quietly into a comer.5 It is necessary therefore, he argues, to search for an alternative framework in which to understand the nineteenth century heritage of Indian nationalism: one that is complex enough to accommodate data which suggests that the colonial situation set limits on full-scale bourgeois development. Sarkar's work is extremely important because it sets out to recharacterize colonialism in the interests of an understanding of Indian nationalism. For the first time then, colonialism is not portrayed either as the adversary in some manichean struggle (as in high nationalist narratives) or as the catalyst of progress (as in marxist history) or indeed as a loosely defined 'context or backdrop against which third world nationalisms emerged (as in liberal accounts). Rather colonialism is presented as creating a structural field (a 'decisive logic') which had a determining influence on the emergence of the bourgeoisie in India. His reading of 'Whig' historiography is symptomatic. The difficulty, however, is that though Sarkar claims he is rejecting a historiography which sets up the narrative as a struggle between reactionary and progressive forces (or indeed between the traditional and the modem), he finally only requires that a certain complexity be written into the paradigm. He demands a new framework but settles for a shift in the familiar liberal oppositions. For as he holds fast to one pole in that binary structure: that of progress, colonialism simply moves in to take the place vacated by its Other: tradition. And like the previous occupant colonialism 'maims', 'distorts', 'sets limits (on) full-blooded' modernism. The story of colonialism becomes one of 'retreat and decline' (p. 2), the characters 'weak and distorted caricatures' (p.l3) unlike their 'virile', Trotestanf counterparts. The hierarchies remain unscathed. Colonialism takes on the role of 'tradition' and Numbers 17-18