ABSTRACT
Rabindranath Tagore, modern India’s most celebrated poet,informed Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi in 1939 that hecould identify only two ‘modernists’ among India’s national leaders. Even these two rare embodiments of ‘modernism’ were deeply attached to their country’s ancient heritage. In his book The Discovery of India Jawaharlal Nehru took solace in ‘the continuity of a cultural tradition through five thousand years of history’ which made the 180 years of British rule in India seem like ‘just one of the unhappy interludes in her long story’. And on the opening page of The Indian Struggle Subhas Chandra Bose emphasized two features critical to an understanding of India: first, its history had to be ‘reckoned not in decades or in centuries but in thousands of years’; and second, only under British rule India ‘for the first time in her history had begun to feel that she had been conquered.’ The mission of an independent India, therefore, should be to deliver to the world a rich ‘heritage’ that had been preserved from past ages.
