ELITISM OF NATIONALIST DISCOURSE 43 'encapsulate perfectly the specific political demands as well as the modalities of thought of a peasant communal consciousness* (p. 100). Clearly, there are many ambiguities in Gandhism. And a proper understanding of its history must go into a detailed examination of how these ambiguities created the possibility for those two great movements that form pan of the story of the formation of the new Indian State: on the one hand, the transformation in each region and among each strata of society, the demands of the people into the 'message of the Mahatma', and on the other, the appropriation of this movement into the structural forms of a bourgeois organisational and later constitutional order (pp. 101-102). (v) In Nehru the author finds an entirely novel ideological reconstruction of the elements of nationalist thought. This can be seen as the 'final, fully mature stage of the development of nationalism in India—its moment of arrival*. It was a reconstruction whose specific form was to situate nationalism within the domain of a State ideology. Given the historical constraints imposed on the Indian bourgeoisie within the colonial social formation, its intellectual-moral leadership could never be firmly established in the domain of the civil society. Of historical necessity, its revolution had to be passive; the specific ideological form of the passive revolution in India was an etatisme, explicitly recognising a central, autonomous and directing role of the State and legitimising it by a specifically nationalist marriage between the ideas of progress and social justice (p. 132). (vi) So Chatterjee reaches the conclusion that The critique of nationalist discourse must find for itself the ideological means to connect the popular strength of those struggles (of the people-nation) with the consciousness of a new universality, to subvert the ideological sway of a State, which falsely claims to speak on behalf of the nation and to challenge the presumed sovereignty of a science which puts itself at the service of capital, to replace, in other words, the old problematic and thematic with new ones. (p. 170) Before starting on a polemic with the author, one must congratulate him for having made a highly ambitious attempt to write a well-argued intellectual history of modem India. The compass of analysis shows his absolute grasp of Western social and political philosophy. Chapter I compresses a whole range of interpretations of nationalism, while it also manages to include a brilliant summary of the recent contributions to the intellectual history of nineteenth-century India. But one regrets the fact that this has not been properly integrated in the rest of the book. Chapter II attempts to familiarise the reader with the specifically chosen use of some of the philosophical concepts, which set the frame for the arguments to follow in the chapters on Bankim, Gandhi and Nehru. The titles given to these chapters are rather catchy but the quotation from Brecht in the beginning of the book, unintentionally bewares the reader of their polemical content The book can boast of uniqueness as nothing of this kind exists.