PRE-HISTORY AND HISTORY OF THE DMK 61 Barnett is clearly incapable of establishing any theoretical connection between the development of . a Tamil nationality and developing capitalism; between the awakening to life of the Tamils as a nationality and the anti-imperialist and anti-feudal stirrings and struggles of the masses; between the democratic posing of the national question in terms of overthrowing imperialism and eliminating national inequality and special privileges and the slogan of nationalism and ^national culture^ employed by the indigenous bourgeoisie, partly against imperialism, partly (in alliance with landlords) to drug the minds of the toiling people and to divert them from the path of revolutionary class struggle. Barnett understands the process of nationality formation and nationalism apart from their real historical and class context. She makes a schematic distinction between ^cultural nationalism' and ^territorial nationalism3; and reduces Tamil nationalism, by sheer bookish assertion to ^cultural nationalism9, that is, something less than full-fledged national consciousness. Tamil nationalism, according to Barnett, ... is not territorial but cultural nationalism. The cultural nationalist sees the nation as inherent in the group of people who possess certain cultural characteristics; and so, while the territorial nationalist gives priority to the direct relationship of the individual to the territorially defined nation state, the cultural nationalist gives priority to collective cultural realisation through nationalism. Cultural nationalists within a culturally heterogenous territorial state are likely to stress equality of individuals.2 Imposing Theory on the Facts Why the real process of nationality formation and national awakening is reduced to a discredited, alter* bourgeois slogan8 is not at all made clear. Nowhere in her study does Barnett attempt to substantiate her assertion that Tamil nationalism is merely "cultural nationalism'. Here, then, is an abstract theoretical imposition whose function is to cut off the Tamil nationality and Tamil national consciousness from their soil and to turn them into an invisible, self-contained force. It must be emphasised that the concept or slogan of ^cultural nationalism' is completely alien to this context. It is not derived from life; it is a bookish concoction. The Western political scientist introduces it in a context where nobody is known to have thought in these terms, or raised this slogan in any recognisable sense. The theoretical construct of developing cultural nationalibm has no reference to a living and active nationality striving along with other nationalities, to break free from the shackles of imperialism and feudalism. Nor does the author attempt to relate the slogans of nationalism to any particular class. Barnctt's Tamil cultural nationalism, lacking class content and premissed on Hans Kohn's vulgar-abstract schema of nationalism,4 is clearly an imagined state of mind. It relates to the research in the role of an academic