42 SOCIAL SCIENTIST gives specific shape to its politics. . .Pitting itself against the reality of colonial rule. . .nationalism seeks to assert the feasibility of entirely new political possibilities. These are its political claims which colonialist discourse haughtily denies. Only a vulgar reductionist can insist that these new possibilities simply emerge out of the supposedly objective working of the world-historical process, that they do not need to be thought out, formulated, propagated and defended in the battefield of politics. . .The polemical content of nationalist ideology is its politics, (p. 40). 3. The nationalist discourse aspiring for 'intellectual moral leadership in a colonial situation was also shaped by the objective constraints inherent in the colonial situation, e.g., the political position of older governing classes, a backward agrarian economy, the weakness of the indigenous bourgeoisie, etc. 4. The nationalist discourse as it evolved in this context acquired a crooked form (Chatterjee cites the analogy from Brecht: 'Crooked line', p. vii). Its historical manifestations may be seen as follows: (i) The inherent conflict between the 'modem* and the 'national' resulted in the bourgeois opposition to imperialism acquiring a dubious character. The half-heartedness and ambiguity was part of the very process of bourgeois development in a colonial country.. .'the dialectics of loyalty and opposition' did not permit 'a clear division among the native bourgeoisie or the entire middle class into two exclusive categories of collaborators and opponents of imperialism.' In India bourgeois opposition to imperialism was always ambiguous, (p. 25) (ii) Nationalist thought at its 'moment of departure' (discussed with reference to Bankim) seems eloquent with the crucial point of tension, i.e., the conflict between the 'modem' and the 'national'. In a situation where both the reformists (identifiable with moderate nationalists) and the revivalists (those talking of a more uncompromising position on the question of colonial rule) 'were equally prisoners of the rationalism, historicism and scientism of the nationalist thematic' (p. 80), the latter understandably tried to lay an 'ideological emphasis on what was distinctly 'national', i.e., culturally distinct from the Western and modem' (p. 81). (iii) The nationalist discourse, being essentially elitist, was faced with the 'insurmountable difficulty of reconciling the modes of thought characteristic of a peasant consciousness with the rationalist forms of an 'enlightened' nationalist politics. 'Either peasant consciousness would have to be transformed, or else it would have to be appropriated' (p. 81). The first 'could hardly seem a viable political possibility. The other possibility then was an appropriation of peasant support for the historic cause of creating a nation-State in which the peasant masses would be represented, but of which they would not be a constituent part. In other words, a 'passive* revolution' (p.81). (iv) The intervention of Gandhism at this particular stage in the development of nationalist discourse was of immense historical importance. Gandhism, as a 'critique of civil society* (so Chatterjee convincingly argues), adopted a standpoint that lay entirely outside the thematic of post-Enlightenment thought, and hence of nationalist thought as well. Gandhism in its formulation of 'the legitimacy of resistance to an oppressive State apparatus' could