scholar could well attempt to understand how these were seen by the contemporaries who were willy-nilly confronted with a situation demanding some kind of a reconciliation between the loyalties they extended to the traditional social unities and the one claimed by nascent national consciousness. Did they see any conflict between the two sets of loyalties? Or did they see the new loyalty as an extension of the traditional loyalties - a loyalty, say, demanded by their culture? In working out the implications/consequences of these modes of reconciliation, however, the scholar may not but be guided by his acadamic-ideological understanding of nationalism as a general historical force and in terms of its specific manifestation, in a local setting, of which the resolution studied by him constitutes a particular point. Even in discharging this part of his function, though, it is important that he avoids the trap of a nationalist teleology. II < The three writers chosen for this paper are Bharatendu Harishchandra (1850-85), Pratap Narain Misra (1856-94) and Radhacharan Goswami (1859-1923). Like most of their literary contemporaries in the country, they evinced keen interest in and wrote extensively on public affairs. Besides being creative writers, they were journalists also. They conducted their own papers even though, given the general public apathy and official hostility, journalism then entailed a variety of risks and few attendant compensations. Journalism was a mission with them, as it was with most Indian writers at that time. For them, in fact, no clear distinction existed between literature and journalism.4 Literary genres were freely used by them to invest their reactions to public issues with forms that would be less ephemeral than an ordinary journalistic piece. Besides, such use would reduce the risk of exposure to adverse official reaction. Quite often their journalistic pieces were so penned as to deserve being ranked as literary essays. There was, even when they camouflaged it through literary devices like allegory, a transparence about their writings which reveal the innermost recesses of their thoughts and thought processes. Illumined herein is a level of social consciousness which, with its implicit attitudes and assumptions, did influence the course of modern Indian history, but left behind little by way of the kind of'hard5 evidence that the historian is apt to demand and unlikely to get. Communal consciousness runs as a kind of recurring theme in the works of these writers and merges ineluctably into national consciousness. It even attempts to arrogate to itself the status of nationalism. In order to show this fusion of communal and national consciousness, only such writers have been chosen as were self-consciously nationalist in their outlook.Communal consciousness, as reflected in these works, relates to the perception of the Hindus and Muslims as two separate homogeneous communities, a perception that was not devoid of feelings of bitterness and resentment. Bharatendu Harishchandra died just a year before the Indian National Con- Journal of Arts and Ideas 7