NATIONALISM 43 situation, and the anti-feudal, anti-caste and anti-imperialist struggles were various facets of the overall national movement. Historians of modern India have not yet done enough justice to Indian nationalism as a theme. Not that a voluminous literature is not there on the subject, particularly on the development of the national movement and, to a lesser extent, also on its regional variations. But a total comprehension of the movement for nation formation and all the conflicting contents of nationlism within a single explanatory framework has yet to be achieved. Serious scholarly efforts in this direction that have continued in recent years are therefore most welcome.2 The relevant existing literature suffers from a confusing use of categories. More often than not 'nationalism', 'patriotism5 and 'anti-colonialism9 are used interchangeably and indiscriminatingly, thus hindering the very understanding of the essentials of the national process in terms of the transitional class formations, their interests and the teleology of the relevant mobilisations. This often results in treating as national any anti-foreign movement or social protest, even one of purely local or sectional nature taking place within the narrow grooves of the collective self-awareness of a tribe, caste or religious sect. What is not taken into consideration is whether it transcended ethnic boundaries to attain a territorial solidarity and whether it offered an ideological and political alternative which could be deemed progressive in the context of the rising capitalist relations. Similarly, much confusion arises from different meanings imputed to the term 'nationality'. According to the Concise Oxford Dictionary, it means "existence as a nation race forming part of one or more political nations". In scientific discussion, too, this ambiguity is retained. To different scholars and sometimes to the same scholar, it has meant different things—a people, a politically crystallised community of culture at its pre-capitalist stage,3 a less developed form of a nation at the stage of mercantile capitalism, a small nation not viable enough for separate sovereign statehood and so on. Even when the terms, 'nationality' and 'nation', are carefully defind to bring out the distinction, semantic confusion still persists. For the derivative terms, 'national' and 'nationalism', can be related to either of them. For instance, when one refers to India as a multinational state, the components may be understood as nations, or as nationalities as it happens in the case of China; or some of them as nations and the rest as nationalities as in the case of the Soviet Union. In terms of our own Constitution, India is however viewed, as a composite nation consisting of linguistic states and Union territories. Similar confusion arises over the identification of the appropriate territorial/demographic base of the collective self-awareness that is called nationalism. Does the whole country, the entire Indian people, provide this base? Or is it a relatively more homogeneous part of it having a separate collective self-awareness of its own that provides the