BOOK REVIEW 59 What needs to be understood in this context is the total reliance on a make-belief system that was invoked to sustain this frame of mind. Facts and history were the biggest casualties. Putting 'mythology to creative use', 'nostalgia for a past worthy of emulation, a need to respond to the oppressive colonial presence, in what appeared to be a hopeless situation, may have been the factors for substituting myth for history. That it was done is beyond doubt. Resorting to this easy method deeply embedded reliance on myth as a strategem in the psyche of the "vernacular mind".' In Chandra'-s words, 'a collective amnesia seems to have marked Hindu social psychology'. Hindu-Muslim unity was, of course, underlined for reasons of political expediency, but the Muslim was always treated as the other 'other'. As Chandra notes, 'Resentment against Muslims was more than the reflection of a need for a dark interregnum, necessary to sustain the twin myths of divine dispensation and a glorious past.' Sati, purdah, child-marriage and even the caste system were believed to have and portrayed as emerging in response to the evil Muslim rule. In one of his plays Pratapnarain propounds the view that Sad was unknown in pre-Muslim India. The Arya Samajist leader Shraddhananda wrote: 'There was no trace of the present caste system during the Puranic age. It is a direct outcome of the advent of Muslim rule in India.' These are not exceptions. Chandra notes, 'Like Dayanand's revivalism, the violence of his attacks on adversary religions and sects may be seen as more or less typical of contemporary Hindu consciousness.' 'This belief in the relation between Muslim rule and Hindu decline was almost exiomatic. The correlation was projected even in situations where blaming Muslims strained the limits of plausibility.' That this was real is obvious. Whether it was inevitable may sound hypothetical, to which no answer can be given with any degree of definitiveness. Sudhir Chandra does provide a few clues as to how it came to be: 'Exaggeration and fantasy were characteristic features of the popular Indian mode of perception and articulation'; the existence of sharply polemical and vituperative literature like the uninterrupted translations of Prabodhchandrodaya and the availability of rather anti-Muslim history texts like Itihasatimirnashak on which middle class Hindu youth was brought up. Be that as it may, the question that needs to be addressed, and the importance of which Chandra is acutely aware of, is why and how the 'vernacular mind' carries this legacy un-critically to our day. The dominant intellectual discourse in this country still remains under the sway of the 'vernacular mind*. If we are wary of the ambi valence of our forebears in the present-day context, then understanding the sources of this phenomenon is as important as to build a critique of it, in order to transcend it, and not to disown it. If our consciousness, as a continuum of the nineteenth century social consciousness, is the product of an