DISCUSSION 93 12. Panikkar perhaps comes closer to the view that religion does have different roles in different historical conjuctures, when he talks about the civil use of religion by 'humanists'. Here too his emphasis is on how they took away religion from its otherwordly trappings and located it in a materialistic context, i.e, in a 'rationalistic' context. 13. Mrgaret T. Egnor, 'Internal Iconity in Paraiyar 'Crying Songs' in Stuart H. Blackburn and A K Ramanujam (ed). Another Harmony : New Essays on the Folklore of India, Delhi, 1986, p. 334. 14. G Kesavan, Nattupuraviyal Katturaigal, Tiruchi, 1987, pp. 27, 88-113 (in Tamil). 15. David D. Shulman, 'Battle as Metaphor in Tamil Folk and Classical Traditions', in Stuart H. Blackburn and A K Ramanujam, op.cit, p. 126. 16. Partha Chatterjee, opxit, p. 185. 17. This is an error which characterises a large corpus of history writing. O^en not merely the 'man in the mass' who is excluded from and silenced in such histories, but even those who provided intellectual leadership in an organic sense to the subordinate classes. Here, it is instructive to quote what G P Despande noted about the exclusion of Phule in the histories of the nineteenth century India: 'Phule unlike Ram Mohan Roy who was for reformed vedantism was a complete rebel against brahminical tradition and had an organic link with the social ethos that the lower caste Marathi bhakti poetry represented. Modern Indian historiography has ignored this man until very recently and the commonly heard dalit criticism that the high caste, English-educated historians felt at home with the positions taken and the reforms advocated by people like Ram Mohan Roy and Agarkar but would not want to touch a Kunbi (low peasant) like Phule with a barge pole is not entirely baseless' (see: G P Despande, 'Dialectics of Defeat: Some reflections on Literature, Theatre and Music in Colonial India', Economic and Political Weekly, December 12, 1987, p. 2172.) 18. Antonio Gramsd, Selections From the Prison Notebooks, New York, 1973, p. 330. 19. Tomas Borge, 'Sandinism, not Socialism', Frontier, October 31,1987.