SOCIAL SCIENTIST even majority of the people, to have roughly equal access to cultural goods, that may be shared by 'a people' or a whole nation to any significant extent. Culture, in other words, is not an arena for harmonious unfolding of the National Spirit, as is often supposed by those who borrow their nationalist vocabulary from German Romanticism. Nor is 'Culture' simply a zone of the aesthetic. It is a field, rather, of contention and conflict, among classes and among other social forces that struggle for dominance. Every nation has at any given time not one culture but several, and these contentions take not only the benign form of 'unity in diversity', as our nationalism presupposes, but also as unity of opposites. In today's context, then, we have to reject certain kinds of cultural nationalism and fashion for ourselves a different kind. The essential task in the politics of culture is to combat the elitist, revivalist, communalist culture with its orientation toward the past and toward Brahminical classicism. Instead of that kind of culture, we have to build a democratic, secular culture of modern civic values and radical equalities. In this alternative conception, then, the very idea of culture as a cultivation of spirit is seen as a privilege that is available to some and denied to most. The distinctions between high culture and popular culture, between the great tradition and the little tradition, are then seen as so many modes of the hierarchical organisation of the sphere of culture as a whole, which is by its very nature repressive. Classicism is therefore seen not just as accumulated wisdom of the ages but also an anachronism that weighs upon the souls of the oppressed. From the materialist conception of culture - the conception of culture as sets of material practices by different strata in society -comes the conception of what Gramsci called "the national-popular," in which the nation itself is identified with the popular classes as such, so that a "national culture' can only arise out of the practices as well as aspirations of those classes. This conception of national culture as "national-popular' has an orientation not toward the past, as in revivalist conception, but toward the future; culture itself is conceived then not as a finished common possession, beyond the various social hierarchies, but as a struggle for cultural entitlements as part of a much broader democratic struggle for social and economic entitlements of various kinds. This conception of the "national-popular' distinguishes itself from mere populism in two ways. One is that it does not regard the oppressed as cultureless, it recognises that there are numerous traditions of the oppressed which are intrinsically libertarian and egalitarian, that those traditions are among our central