Introduction: Careers of Modernity in a recent paper, 'The shaping of the normative human subject in our context involved, on the one hand, a dialectical relationship of inequality and opposition with the classical subject of western liberalism, and on the other hand, its coding as upper-caste, middle class, Hindu and male, a coding rendered invisible in the 2 redesignation of this subject-self as modern, secular and democratic. The coding was effected by processes of othering/differentiation such as, e.g., the definition of upper caste/class female respectability in counterpoint to lower-caste licentiousness, or Hindu tolerance to Muslim fanaticism.' The Indian modem (or, as the articles here show, the Kannada or Tamil modem) rests on universalisms and exclusions that make invisible diverse kinds of subaltern identities. We are not, however, reluctant modems but resistant ones, not rejecting but reappropriating, hoping to engage in a politics which mobilizes alternative histories, other genealogies, of the modem. The Right's recent occupation of the terrain of nation and citizenship reveals that our secularism was coded from the beginning as upper-caste/class Hindu, and that the arena of its agentive subject has been the Hindu nation, only now beginning to be named as such. When national identity, as Satish Deshpande has argued, detaches itself from an imagined economy and allows the term Hindu/Indian to 'float', the universal modern is enabled by globalization to name itself without embarrassment, as Hindu; an internationalised Indian's 'Hindu-ness' provides one more quaint identity for the sameness-indifference of post-industrial life, an identity which declares its authenticity by claiming the truly modem, the truly secular. If what we call for is not an abdication but a reclaiming, how then do we redeploy and re-imagine the nation—and thereby the modern? Do we begin, perhaps, by historicizing the present? In this issue, Satish Deshpande writes of the imagined economy that was India before the nineties. R. Srivatsan examines the positions made available by photographic technology for the modern Indian viewer-subject. Ashish Rajadhyaksha details how the cultural debates about Swadeshi indigenism became debates about realism, which he sees as a key site of cultural hegemony in cinema. Madhava Prasad speculates on the cultural significance of the prohibition of kissing in Indian cinema in his discussion of modernity, desire and nation-state. Sibaji Bandyopadhyay charts the culture-memory of the Bengali middle-class, arguing that the 'capital' of popular fiction derives from a certain invocation of 'English' (language, nation, heroes) combined with Bengali nationalism. Sasheej Hegde suggests that we be attentive to the temporality of the discourse of/about modernity, and asks how we think the time of the present, the question of which often supplants that of the 'modem'. Vivek Dhareshwar reflects on the non-availability of caste as a critical category caused by the secular, modern and nationalist disavowal of caste identity, and speculates on 'caste polities' as transformatory critique. V. Geetha writes about the emancipatory project of the early twentieth century dalit-Buddhist scholar Ayothidas Pandithar, who in employing caste as a privileged category of historical analysis tried to create a vision of historical rationality different from the hegemonic images of it. In my own essay, I argue that the literary critical imperative to evaluate is inextricable from the dominant notion of the modem, and that Journal of Arts & Ideas