Re-presenting Colonialism a superficial impact on the societies they conquered, for not only was it riven by contradictions within, it also did not have the strength or the will to penetrate deep into the foundations of popular life among the colonized. After all, we all know what to make of the modernizing pretensions of both the colonial power and the nationalist elite: they are an ideological facade for structures of dominance, one sustaining the other, but inherently false because superficial and ineffectual. Having followed the winding trajectories of Indian social science in the last two 133 decades, I have of course heard it all before, I have witnessed the latest performances of the remnants of the Cambridge school of Indian history, risen from the rubble of its earlier collapse, proclaiming now with much erudition that from markets and banking to peasant differentiation and communal riots, everything had existed in pre-colonial India. Seen in the larger context of fundamental transformative processes, colonialism as an identifiable and conscious agency had little if any impact: it might not, one can almost hear the half-uttered whisper, have existed at all. I have also seen neo-Gandhians and 'grassrooters' fondly recreate an indigenous popular tradition, strong, self-directed and innovative, learning through centuries of experience to create in everyday life the collective space for social harmony, mutual tolerance and personal freedom. For them, colonialism and everything that still goes with it is an eminently forgettable intrusion foisted by the west and its local imitators upon their timeless dream of recreating Utopia. My colleagues have in the meantime strayed into something of an impasse. The exercise of breaking down the colonial edifice into its separate parts has thrown up a series of perplexing riddles. Is colonialism to be seen as necessarily related to European capitalism? Then what about the Caribbeans and Mexico and South America in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries? What about—the questions can no longer be held back—Arab colonialism in Europe and Africa, or Roman colonialism in the ancient world? If European missionaries or doctors or teachers were often critical of the policies of the colonial state, did their criticism still form part of a single colonial discourse? If European women, because of their subordinate position as women, were required to perform a certain role in the colonies, could they be accepted unproblematically as a constituent part of the colonial ruling class? Riddles, paradoxes... surprise, puzzlement, dismay... until finally one can sense a feeling of general despair at having lost all grip over what had once seemed a promising project. For some inexplicable reason, my mind keeps flying off to those two chapters in Hegel's Logic—'The Doctrine of Being' and The Doctrine of Essence'. The unity of quality and quantity in determinate being is its measure. Measure is implicitly essence. Essence is self-relation or identity. Its form must be held apart from difference, through abstraction. Either we neglect a part of its multiple features which are found in a concrete thing and select only one of them, or neglecting their variety we concentrate the multiple characters into one. If, without holding on to the form of self-identity, we lose ourselves in difference, we will lose the object of knowledge as well. It is time for me to say something, but I realize that dialectical logic will not go Journal of Arts <& Ideas