ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the debates on tradition, modernity and nation-building in which modern Indian intellectuals—— from Rammohun Roy to Jawaharlal Nehru, from Gandhians to Marxists——participated. It examines a wide spectrum of thought patterns, trends and worldviews. Intellectuals grow up as they communicate with the larger world. Raja Rammohun Roy ——the great “renaissance” man——and all those who followed him gave a new momentum to the development of new ideas. Politics was becoming more and more intense. The critical engagement with the West, for S. A. Dange, meant a way of fighting capitalism and its implicit greediness, idleness, cruelty, and luxurious and demoralized life ethos. Modernization involved not just industrialization but also a secular, rationalist, humanist and scientific worldview and all that it implied. A major component of the Nehruvian project of nation-building is science. Rajni Kothari articulates the intellectual philosophy beneath the rise of these grass roots movements. Metropolitan intellectuals tend to look at local intellectuals with contempt.
