60 SOCIAL SCIENTIST movement into a political party and eventually a state administration" lacks a serious theoretical standpoint, basis and direction. Its theoretical content is an eclectic mixture of elements from different abstract bourgeois social anthropological, sociological and political science theories.1 Consequently, the tendency ofBarnett's summation and interpretation of her research is to focus on the superficial; to mix up the essential with the inessential, the primary with the secondary, the significant with the trivial. The research is irrevocably split into industrious, but unevenly pursued empirical investigation and an extremely abstract theoretical construct or scheme of ^cultural nationalist" and political behaviour. The split can never be bridged, hence the problem that Bar^etf appears to take up — the national question in Tamil Nadu as it manifested itself in the politics of a multi-national society — can never be resolved, within the academic-ideological framework she accepts. CRITIQUE OF THEORETICAL COMPONENT Our basic critique of Barnett's study is that, in its eclectic mixture of abstract, schematic theory and empiricism, it obscures and diverts attention from the main direction and the essential trends of the political development of Madras Presidency (and, in the process, of the Indian sub-continent) in the period under study. It follows that the study cannot establish a serious connection between f cultural nationalism9 and the essential aspects of political development in the Madras Presidency. To start with, Barnett's study does not really face head-on the question of the awakening to^national life of the Tamil people under British rule. The national question in Tamil Nadu—and on the Indian sub-continent—is not seen primarily as a part of the national-colonial question, as an integral part of the experience of the people's struggle against British imperialist rule. Rather, the anti-imperialist direction in which the national question developed is implicitly denied in a study which mixes up irreconcilable theoretical conceptions of caste, class, nationality, political identity and ideology. Elite non-Brahmins ranged against Brahmins and hence the origins of Tamil cultural nationalism9. Forward non-Brahmin opposition to the backward non-Brahmins and Untouchables, backward non-Brahmins ranged against Untouchables and other backward social groups; the fragmentation of the non-Brahmin movement and emergence of the demand for Dravida Nadu. The development of ^cultural nationalism' from movement to party, along the path of pragmatic bread-and-butter exis" fence. It is as though British imperialist oppression and its invidious policy ofr divide and rule9 did not dominate this historical period. It is as though the Tamil people—understood by the author in terms of sweeping mega-caste categories—and t-he people of various nationalities on the Indian sub-continent were not rising with growing sweep, militancy and success against their enemy, British imperialism!