SOCIAL SCIENTIST
solemnly proclaimed the unity of historical experience. They marvel at the continuous, if moody, flow of the stream of history.2 Sometimes it is suggested that such idealistic abstraction as the immanent unity of history is something which philosophers can posit or prove or expatiate on, so long as they are assured that the actual job of saying what happened in history is assigned to somebody else. The historian on his part, accustomed as he is to the naive defence of his own virtues of objectivity, had once claimed that periodisation was only a convenient, legitimate, though provisional, way of grasping what was otherwise too vast and unwieldy a subject. But to-day, the more honest among historians know that they live in a slightly more sinful world, and that any masterful or tinkering act of periodisation of history carries with it a defined or yet-to-be defined ideological burden.3 An awareness of its implication and its intended or unintended consequences would enable the historian to situate himself in the world which he seeks to comprehend and explain. My interest in interrogating the 'modern' in Indian history is not to relocate its origin or resettle its chronological boundaries; nor do I intend to impeach the idea of acquiescing in the label of 'modern' for a good segment of Indian history. Such acquiescence is a fact, and what is significant is that it is crucial fact for the understanding of modern Indian history. The 'modern' in Indian history is associated with the colonial subjugation of the country — subjugation not in the sense of drum-and-trumpet conquest, but as a vigorous process of ideological permeation and osmotic take-over. The strategies of military conquest, which the British unfolded from time to time, were directed against a nervous, turbulent feudal world. Whether they had done it by design or in a fit of absent-mindedness is not a matter which should again be submitted for adjudication. Nor does Seeley's argument — that there was no real British conquest of India since the British sate or its army was not directly involved in it — merit another refutation.4 His logic apparently made sense to his audience in England; but for the conquered it meant little, either as logic or as anodyne. Those who were conquered felt indeed dispossessed, which some of them contested, sword in hand, while others merely simpered their acquiescence. Contesting the British arms could be a passionate, heroic or patrotic affair; but it was not yet a nationalist one. The indignation which the nationalist historiography has expressed against the lack of unity or cohesion among those who fought the British or against the betrayals and quislings that had smoothened the road to conquest, does not reckon with the inapplicability of a passionate nationalist