MODERNITY'S EDGES modernity, Greenfeld sees modernity as defined by nationalism. This of course tides over the point whether historically the emergence of nationalism predated modernity. But cf. Balibar: "(T)he ever-recurring paradox of nationalism: the regressive imagining of a nation-state where the individuals would by their nature be 'at home', because they would be 'among their own' (their own kind), and the rendering of that state uninhabitable; the endeavour to produce a unified community in the face of 'external' enemies and the endless rediscovery that the enemy is 'within', identifiable by signs which are merely the phantasmatic elaboration of its divisions. Such a society is in a real sense a politically alienated society. But are not all contemporary societies, to some degree, grappling with their own political alienation?" ('Class Racism' in Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, London: Verso, 1991, p.215). This paradox may be juxtaposed against the point about an India living with modernity but remaining ambivalent with respect to the problem of modernization. The axiomatic frames in which thinkers have thought the question remain to be exhausted. Cf. also n.81 below. See Dipesh Chakrabarty, Tostcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for 'Indian' Pasts?', Representations, Vol.37,1992, pp.1-26; or, more recently, his 'Radical Histories and the Question of Enlightenment Rationalism: Some Recent Critiques of Subaltern Studies', Economic and Political Weekly, Vol.30 (14) 1995, pp.751-59. Also: S.N. Balagangadhara, 'The Future of the Present: Thinking through Orientalism' Cultural Dynamics, Vol.10 (2) 1998, pp.101-21. For Partha Chatterjee, as for Javeed, a critical stance towards India's modernity is also a critique of nationalism's contradictory contents. Strictly speaking, however, the critique is not designed to unmask the inner falsehood of the entire world of national representations and to trace back the contents of modernity from their distorted form to what they really are (although the elements of such an orchestration are there, in the pages of ILM). Javeed's critical stance is rather a way of preserving and embedding all of modernity's contents, through a critique of the form in which modernity manifests itself, or the way in which it is represented. Obviously, this critique also runs over into the content, and thus contains a certain repudiation of modernity's contents as well. It is significant, perhaps, that the Gramscian construct of 'passive revolution' configuring Chatterjee (at least of Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World, op.cit.) hardly finds echo in Javeed. The latter's basic orientation is - remains - the restoration and reconstitution of modernity. Notwithstanding what Aijaz Ahmad has to say, one may yet have to return to Fredric Jameson's prognosis of the 'national allegory' - in his 'Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism', Social Text Fall 1986, pp.65-88 - but with the sensitivities that I have tried to posit. Ahmad's critical rejoinder is, of course, contained in his In Theory, op.cit., pp.95-122. Cf. also Sanjay Subrahmanyam, 'Hearing Voices: Vignettes of Early Modernity in South Asia, 1400-1750', Daedalus, Vol.127 (3) 1998, pp.75-104 passim and the editorial observations of Bjorn Wittrock, 'Early Modernities: Varieties and Transitions' in the same issue of Daedalus, pp. 19-40. Cf. all over again the contentions - convictions - anchoring the concluding paragraph of Sect.V.