114 SOCIAL SCIENTIST The British colonial state in India was not only a set of institutions and structures but also a set of discourses. The success of these discourses was essential for the legitimisation and political stability of the colonial rule in the socio-political context. The colonial state was inextricably dependent on a set of discursive structures premised on the ideas of Enlightenment. The persons dealing with this colonial state, whether in a collaborative or contesting manner, recognised and respected the indivisibility and importance of the myth of invincibility of western rationality, which was fundamental to understanding its institutions and logic of functioning. Drawing on its rationalist discursive structures, the colonial state adopted multiple levels of dialogue symbol 45 \f "Symbol" \s 11 when addressing the British public opinion it used the tone of reasonableness; that of education and legislation in dealing with the Indian intelligentsia and indigenous middle-class; and, that of force in dealings with the large and distant masses of India. The language of education and legislation that the colonial state employed with the middle-class and Indian intelligentsia was most significant in generating and maintaining political hegemony in India. It generated a new kind of discourse that, at once, consolidated the power of the colonial state as well as undermined it in the years to come.2 The colonial state's projects of legislation and education led the Indian intelligentsia to view the colonial state, in contrast to the pre-colonial state, as one that defended the rule of law, security of life and property and provided an opportunity to acquire knowledge of European arts and sciences. Furthermore, the vision of political future of democratic and constitutional governance accompanied with modern industrial development, as projected by the colonial state, was adopted by the Indian intelligentsia as their own. "In their conception, England which held out the ideals of parliamentary democracy, civil liberties and modern economic development, would act as the instruments for their dispensation to other countries of the world. England was a 'mirror of their own future"'. British rule was, thus, "welcomed as the chosen instrument"3 to change the despotic conditions4 of pre-colonial India into a bourgeois-democratic system. This belief had its roots in the false consciousness created by the ideologies disseminated by the colonial rulers. Hence, a collaborative relationship developed between the colonial rulers and the intelligentsia of the colonised people in which the latter accepted world-view, apparatus of knowledge, criteria of judgement and ideology of the former. The hegemonic consensus that emerged,