64 SOCIAL SCIENTIST is the much discussed and sometimes much praised book of Anil Seal, The Emergence of Indian J^ationalism. Seal, despite his efforts at an up-to-dateness as far as his style and use of terminology are concerned, betrays his basically liberal predilections when he talks about the emergence of modern politics in India : "Education was one of the chief determinants of these politics, and their genesis is clearly linked with those Indians who had been schooled in western methods" (p 16). Education receives the closest possible attention and the book is profusely padded with a number of charts and tables on English education and related topics. For instance, we are provided with tables of the number of educated by province, 1864-85 (p 18); the growth of education in arts colleges in British India, 1870-91 (p 19); knowledge of English by caste among literate male Hindus of Bengal, 1891 (p 62); growth of education at the universities of Calcutta, Bombay and Madras, 1857-88 (p 355); employment of graduates : All-India review by region until 1882 (p 357); and a host of. others. In glaring contrast the economic condition of India receives scant attention. Seal's predilections become manifest when, in a book comprising of more than 400 pages, only five pages are devoted to any discussion of the Indian economy. Although there is much in Seal's book that is not new, it would be erroneous to surmise that it is merely a polished repetition of what the early historians had already written. What is new is an analytical discussion about the nature of Indian society in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, from which is derived the notion that "genuine nationalism" did not exist in India.4 In this discussion, there is a curious conglomeration of a variety of theoretical farmulations that have been enmeshed in each other : the Weberian analysis of social structure and the identification of social status groups, the Namierite structural analysis and Pareto's theory of the circulation of elites. Seal differs from the early liberals in more ways than one. The most striking divergence is to be found in his understanding of the concept of nationalism. The early liberal historians in the German Idealist tradition tended to emphasise the 'enlightening9 idea of nationalism and freedom, so much so, in fact, that sometimes the objective factors that gave rise to nationalism were overlooked completely. All mass participation—whatever there was—was ascribed solely to the western ideas of freedom and self-rule. Seal too stresses these ideas, which to him were the most powerful instruments by which the lower strata of Indian society was later drawn into the national movement. But Seal deals with the ideology of nationalism in a distinctly demeaning way. To him, nationalism is an artful ideology—a successful gadget and nothing else. Similar has been the attitude of many western social scientists to revolutionary ideologies all over the world. For instance, Leninism becomes a mere "eclectic technique enabling one to respond to power situations55.5 SeaFs argument has the elegant symmetry of a geometrical theorem. He starts from the basic assumption of intense competition in a 'cockpit'