The Formation of India 9 the Brahmo movement), and condemned oppression of women and the barriers of caste. These ideas, as they were disseminated, provided the building blocks for India's nationhood. While there were some anticipations of these notions in our past, the main source of ignition was surely the West. Already in 1789, the French Revolution had made the slogan of "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity" resound throughout the world; other modern ideas, necessarily reshaped to suit religious polemics, came through Christian missionaries; but it was the English language, essential as its learning was for the maintenance of British rule, that opened the doors to the entire modern humanistic thought of Europe. This is the sum and substance of Marx's thesis of Indian "regeneration" under colonial rule ("a new class is springing up, endowed with the requirements of government and imbued with European science"). Current questioning of this thesis from an outspoken anti-colonial viewpoint seems to me to be largely misplaced, however much we may like Edward Said's Orientalism or the play on "colonial knowledge" and "colonial discourse" so fashionable these days. Marx himself had insisted, while speaking of colonial Britain's 'regenerating mission', that her role was blind and unintended, creating "the material conditions for the new world in the same way as geological revolutions have created the surface of the earth". This should answer most of his critics. India's opening to the modern world was as momentous for its own growth as a nation as was the diffusion of modern ideas and social values among wider and wider sections of the people, giving an accelerating sweep to national consciousness. The two processes went hand in hand, whether in Gandhi's rurally oriented Constructive Programme (for Gandhi's ideas too, despite his own subjective views on the matter, had impeccable Western sources) or in the Kisan Movement led by the Left (where Marxism provided the impulse). But there was yet the second aspect to India's evolution into nationhood, of which Mill had spoken, and to which I have referred earlier: the urge of the people of a country to be governed by persons from amongst themselves. It was this that the National Movement was about. The criticism of the economic policies of the British Government, the protest at the exclusion of Indians from the administrative apparatus and the aspirations for representation of the educated classes, formed the main elements of the Indian National Congress programme immediately after its foundation (1885). These in time grew into a vision of an independent state by 1931, when the Congress passed the crucial Fundamental Rights resolution, promising a secular democracy with universal adult suffrage, equality of women, state control of key industries, protection of national industry, workers' rights, and land to the tiller. The struggle against colonial rule thus involved the mass of the peasants and workers; and it was their entry into the National Movement that finally w:on India its freedom. Clearly, it was when the mass of the Indian people recognized in the process of the Freedom Struggle that British rule had to go, that Mill's final condition for a nation was met. The Indian nation has thus emerged after a long process of creation, in which consciousness or the mental orientation of its inhabitants has played a