ABSTRACT
Transfers of power, however momentous or revolutionary, tendto have an air of anti-climax about them. ‘Like the complexelectrical system in any large mansion when the owner has fled’, Benedict Anderson has written in Imagined Communities, ‘the state awaits the new owner’s hand at the switch to be very much its old brilliant self again.’ Where the inheritance is disputed, it might be added, the festival of lights may have a dark side to it. The capture of state power at the triumphal moment of formal decolonization by forces representing singular nationalism generally brought with it problems of its own in socially and culturally heterogeneous ex-colonies, perhaps nowhere more complex than in South Asia. The new owners of the stately mansions built during the colonial era may have at last laid their hands on the switchboards of the electrical mains; but they soon discovered the short circuits in many of the rooms of the mansion that could easily blow most of the worn fuses. In the absence of effective circuit breakers, whole mansions could easily be plunged into darkness.
