LINGUISTIC NATIONALITIES IN INDIA 21 innumerable castes and tribes', with their 'variegated assemblage of races and creeds and the complication of language with^no ^ess, than 222 'vernacular^'. The imperialists, in fact, emphasised India's linguistic and | cultural diversity to deny the authenticity of our nationalist movement. "A policy", according to R Paime Dutt, "which in practice fosters and maintains the division and backwardness of a subject people, and even by its administrative methods intensifies these evils, while in public it loudly proclaims these evils as a melancholy proof of the incapacity of the people for unity and self-government, condemns itself."3 The bourgeois historians, in their search for Indian nationhood, have denied the multi-national character of Indian society. The capitalist-feudal establishment has a vested interest in perpetuating the myth about India's homogeneity as a nation-state. The ruling class is afraid that the class struggles in some parts of India like Kerala oi^West Bejigal may become more intense by assummg~natlonal forim and therefore, the Indian bourgeoisie is anxious to prove that the western concept of nationality is not^agplicable to the Indian situation. In any case, the Indian [ Government cannot be taken to represent any dominant or oppressor J nationality and there are no oppressed or exploited nationalities in the provinces. A/V ^ There is no doubt that the common struggle waged by the Indian people of all nationalities against British imperialism has united them into a nation and, atjpresent, there is no demand for secession by any natio- ^AJ&^L ^A <. nality constitutmgjthe Indian Union. But the capitalist society, which / isTSemg built in India, is based on competitive struggle between social classes and also between nationalities. Further, due to the law of uneven development under capitalism, some nationalities are likely to develop faster than others creating tensions between them. Such tensions can be eliminated only by a system of people's democracy leading to socialist society planning for an equal economic development of all nationalities. / Free nationalities organised on such a basis alone can guarantee the? performance of a federal polity in India. The precapitalist society in India had developed an 'imperial* State based on what Marx called the 'Asiatic mode of production'. As Nainboodjripad says, ^what is popularly known as the Brahmin civilisation is nothing but the superstructure, built on the basis of this Asiatic mode of production. Similarly, what is called the Dravidian civilisation is the mode of living and thinking of the people of South India who were developing themselves from tribal to Asiatic society, indepen' dent of their counterparts in North India.4 With the possible exception of Kerala, where the material basis for an imperial State did not exist, the empires of the Gangetic plain and the Kaveri delta developed similar superstructures. Again as Namboodi-ripad points out, The Dravidian empires of the South were not (as is generally