BOOK REVIEW 73 nationalism, English education stimulated the Muslim sense of having been left behind in the race for jobs and political influence by the Hindus9^.4 The stress on the separate identity of the Muslims tended to be increasingly pronounced with the spread of nationalist ideas^ particularly with the growth of the 'extremist5 phase of Congress politics, of which the assertion of the glory of Hindu religion formed a cardinal belief. The 'extremists', reacting against the 'rootlessness5 of the Moderates and rejecting their bias in favour of the western model of modernization, searched for an indigenous model, and found it in ancient Hindu religion and philosophy. The criticism of alien political rule thus led to the rejection of the political and the general philosophical values of the West. The idioms of the indigenous religion, the extremists also found, were more intelligible to the common masses. The mixing up of nationalist politics and traditional Hinduism naturally alienated very many Muslims, who felt strongly about their religion. (Students of separatist politics should more carefully analyze the reasons why religion came to occupy a central position in the entire world outlook of the Hindu and Muslim leaders, and why any social aud national reconstruction was inconceivable to them without religion. By religion the political leaders did often mean more fundamental principles and beliefs than the prevalent usages connected with religion and the obscurantist social practices. However, political leaders scarcely did anything towards the removal of such practices, so that intellectual and ethical notions of religion co-existed with the popular ones, and the differences in the religious and social practices of Hindus and Muslims created at times an impenetrable barrier between the two communities). Exploitation When the separatist feelings were thus rapidly spreading, the Muslim leaders found immensely reassuring the findings of the Bengal Censuses, which clearly revealed how the Muslims vastly outnumbered the Hindus in very many districts of Bengal. The author has emphasized in this connection two other developments in the Bengali society, though their exact role in the growth of Muslim separatism remains unexplained—first, the attitude of the 'Bengal Renaissance' intellectuals to the particular land system of Bengal, and secondly, the attitude of very many educated Hindus towards 'mass education'. The author fails to establish any direct and close relation between the alleged lack of awareness on the part of the renaissance intellectuals about the manifold evils of Bengalis land system and the growth of separatist feelings. It is wrong to argue that the insufficiently critical attitude of the Bengali intelligentsia to the land system of Bengal'resulted in strengthening it, which as a consequence adversely affected the numerically dominant Muslim peasants. The relation between the apathy of educated Hindus to 'mass education' and the growth of separatism is also a remote one. It is notable that the lack of progress of'mass education5 through vernacular among the Muslims could be blamed to a far greater extent on