Political ideologies focusing in particular on what they call ‘cultural nationalism’—and this is common to many societies apart from the Indian—blata… - Romila Thapar

The majority of current politicians are characterised by little, if any, vision of the kind of society they wish to construct, barring those that come with the limited concept of extreme religious nationalism.

[In India’s case] what one can foresee, perhaps, for the end of the next century [i.e. the twenty-first], is a series of small states federated within a more viable single economic space on the scale of the subcontinent.

Not surprisingly, nationalism was replaced by a form of militant Hinduism, and the communal atmosphere in Indian politics in the late 1930s and the 1940s tended to vitiate the study of ancient and medieval history. The Gupta period became the ‘Golden Age’ largely because it was the period of renascent Hinduism. Many of the ills of India were ascribed to ‘the Muslim invasions and rule’. It was maintained that Hinduism in its Sanskritic form was the essential culture of India, and other forces were in a sense an intrusion.