Caste and the Secular Self battle with the term 'communal'. Consequently, its use in that ideological register seems to be submerging its other significations. As a 'keyword' in our political culture as much as in our cultural politics, 'secular, however, has a more varied and heterogenous career in India, which, or so it seems to me, can only be under-116 stood by reconstructing the cultural elaborations of modern subjectivity. If we were to undertake a Benjaminian history of the childhood of 'midnight's' (and the immediately pre- and post-midnight's) children, we would surely find not only the dreamworld of commodities (those chocolate-boxes, biscuit-tins, hair-oils and radios), not only the rituals and ceremonies of fashioning the national self, the citizen-subject, but also the everyday acts of identification and disavowal that responded to the cultural imperative, 'be modern!' We do not yet know how to write that history of our modernity, of the Indian modern—our historical imagination, unfortunately, being as impoverished as (no doubt, as some would say, because it was fashioned by the imperatives of) our secular politics. In order to understand the 'repression' of caste in this process, we would need to (i) describe how the imaginary horizon that constituted the secular self forced it to 'freeze' caste as a social institution by disavowing it publicly and politically; (ii) delineate the mechanisms by which the elite invented/appropriated the symbolic order of modernity to exercise the power to nominate, classify and represent. In the public sphere the elite has used English—obviously English here is more than simply a language; it is also a juridical/legal apparatus, also a political idiom, in short, a semiotic system signifying modernity, etc.—to impose its secular categories on the social world. This imposition was, undoubtedly, made possible by the elite's complicity with official nomination, in so far as the state, as Bourdieu puts it, is the holder of the monopoly on legitimate symbolic violence. How else to explain our use of SC/ST as political categories, defining the terms of our relationship with whole communities, with ourselves? In having repressed caste this way, the secular self is now finding itself at a loss to handle the return of the repressed (if, in a superficial way, we can characterize Mandal in that way). How do we, then, characterize the social antagonisms that have caused the dislocation of the secular self, that is to say, its ability to be a collective imaginary, the disintegration of the terms that constituted the imaginary of the secular: progress, planning, democracy, etc? The progressivist narrative of liberal humanism (the emancipatory narrative of the left being, in this respect, a variation of it) outlines a trajectory of self-fashioning where the self gradually sheds its ethnic, caste, linguistic and gender markers and attains the abstract identity of the citizen or becomes an individual. In his brilliant analysis of the philosophical and historical coordinates that make possible the emergence of the citizen-subject in Europe, Etienne Balibar argues that: If the citizen's becoming-a-subject takes the form of a dialectic, it is precisely because both the necessity of 'founding' institutional definitions of citizen and the impossibility of ignoring their contestation—the infinite contradiction within which they are caught—are crystallized in it.1 Journal of Arts & Ideas