BRAHMANICAL IDEOLOGY, REGIONAL IDENTITIES 5 militates against the privileging of one region) community or religious group over the others. But then the important question is when and how did this concept of India emerge and crystallise? The works of Amir Khusrau and Abul Fazi, among others, in medieval India represent the richness of India's composite culture and the country as home to different interacting traditions.8 How is it that these traits did not attract the attention of Alberuni a few centuries earlier? Was it simply because his was an outsider's view of India addressed to an exogenous audience or was there more to it? It is recognised that what one writes is informed by the tradition within which he/she writes yet the important question to ask is did the spatial spread of the Sultanate and the Mughal state across the Vindhyas and beyond help in shaping a richer perception of India or, to put it differently, did the societal processes of change of transregional universality fructify and come into their own around the middle of the second millennium AD forcing others to pay attention, to take them seriously? The truth may be rooted in the interplay of the two developments. The formation of regional polities, evolution of regional languages and the pursuit of regional historiographies9 largely during AD lOOO" 1600 bear out our assumption. Flowing from what has been already said it would be logical to ask how and through what stages were the regions constituted and what relationship they had with the larger idea of India? Regions like nations did not exist from times immemorial, they were formed through certain configuration of historical forces over time. We wish to develop the argument with reference to two interrelated aspects, first, the evolution of Brahmanical ideology and, secondly the spatial spread of state societies. Admittedly, Brahmanical ideology and Hinduism are not the only route to understand the Indian reality. Indeed, the past was made of a variety of constituents. The heritage of heterodoxy, for example, from the middle of the first millennium BC onwards stares one in the face and the mutual influences and borrowings between the two in fashioning ideas and practices cannot be swept under the carpet. We choose to focus on Brahmanical ideology because for a large part of our cultural past under discussion it appears to have been the dominant cultural strand. Besides, through it we wish to also show the gamut of interactions, very often quite complex, that went into the making of a unified civilization. The preference for the term Brahmanical as against Hindu/Hinduism has the advantage of indicating a continuity from the later Vedic period onwards. Though Hinduism is seen as a