4 SOCIAL SCIENTIST of many aspects of the imperialist reconstructions, the nationalists wittingly or unwittingly accepted the idea of India as an undifferentiated entity and, deriving from it, as a given cultural and political reality. In the context of the struggle for freedom the compulsions of the nationalist historians, including their fears of ascribing the continuing inheritance of the regions their due is understandable. However, the long shadow it has cast over the dominant historiography in post-Independence India is somewhat intriguing, especially because the uneven patterns in Indian history have been recognised within the same historiography and historians have engaged with the problem since the later 1950s.4 This centrist or epicentric perspective, derived largely from the Gangetic valley and its fringes, fails to appreciate and address the cultural pluralism of the variegated regions. Paradoxically the point of strength also appears to be the weakness of the dominant historiography. While its ability to generalise allows for easy comprehension, the same tends to homogenise the variety of human experience and ignores the specificity of the regions, their comparable, but not similar, sociopolitical trajectories.5 Integrating regional histories into the history of India represents a condescending attitude and is not the same as writing history from within and in terms of the processes in operation across regions.6 Besides, regional history has a bearing on important questions such as causation, periodization and our understanding of the larger pattern of Indian history. The Indian nation is not that frail and fragile as to disintegrate if its oneness is not overemphasized. It is better to recognise and address reality rather than falsify it, if we are to create a sense of enduring unity. The notion of a monolithic unitarian nation/ state is not true. Neither is the concept of India equivalent to a confederation of the regions. There is no conflict here, the two share a harmonious coexistence, though the priority of one over the other is context specific. If the subsumption of the regions under the overarching idea of India does not do justice to the Indian historical experience the opposite position asserting regionalism to the exclusion of an underlying unity too is a falsification of history. The truth lies in the dynamic interrelationship of the two, in the course of which they constituted each other. Regions have not remained insular from evolutions within a larger unit. Regional history and the larger pattern of Indian history, to use a familiar expression, move in tandem. In two recent articles which focus on the conception of India as gleaned from textual references7 it is argued that the idea of India