CULTURE AND POLITICAL ANALYSIS IN INDIA 49 Although the new sensitivity in political analysis to issues of culture is generally to be welcomed, not all attempts to incorporate culture have been unproblematical. In this paper I will identify and analyse two major ways in which the concept of culture is being introduced into contemporary political analysis in India to highlight the kind of questions they have addressed as also some of the limitations of those different modes of analysis. By doing so I hope to also indicate some possible directions for a more adequate form of political analysis. In one influential contemporary mode of analysis culture is conceptualised as the unique expression in the realm of belief systems, ideas and aesthetic expressions, of a community, the source of its continuing identity, the framework within which it can develop with authenticity. Protection of the identity and purity of the culture against alien influences then becomes a political project for the community. Such an organic, totalising conception of culture may be found in a dominant mode of cultural anthropology but it was also adopted by many nationalist movements for whom the assertion of indigenous culture against the colonial was an important political strategy. They projected the national identity as the political expression of a pre-existing cultural community. Thus ironically enough, there was often considerable area of agreement between the Western anthropologists conceptualisation of the culture of 'Other* communities and nationalist self perceptions. In India, the concept of a pre-existing cultural community originally articulated in the nineteenth century has continued into the post-Independence period and has influenced a mode of political thinking. Studies made within this orientation have generally worked with a notion of culture as providing a set of shared meanings and symbols which can be used to interpret attitudes and actions. Further, a strong notion of what characterises indigenous practices and institutions has been put forward to defend a conception of political identity and evolution within cultural parameters. Such a notion of culture has generated a range of studies. Another way in which culture has been appropriated for political analysis in India today is found in studies which focus on culture as a site of political struggles. Here the politics of culture itself is being interrogated from a number of different perspectives. The emphasis is not only on revealing how culture may intersect with structures of power and sustain them but also on studying the political struggles which may take place in the sphere of culture. Such studies have drawn attention to the ways in which culture has helped to reproduce structures as also to the ways in which individuals may negotiate such structures through their actions, the constraints as well as the spaces. The emergence of new social movements like the feminist movement and other movements of the marginalised has clearly given