N the book’s introduction, you write: “Today when we speak of culture the objects and ideas may well be taken back to the ancient past, but our definition of culture is rooted in how culture was perceived in the nineteenth century…” Please elaborate on th

Culture as a concept referred generally to the life-style of the elite and the upper castes and all that was associated with this. In Europe, civilization grew from this and was extended in its application to historical societies. In the nineteenth century and with the association of colonialism, it referred to those societies and countries that had an impressive stamp of an extensive territory, a sophisticated use of a language and therefore of literature in that language, a single religion, of art and architecture and such like.

Culture came to be redefined in the late nineteenth century and was used to refer to a pattern of living. This definition included more than the elite and gradually extended over the entire hierarchy of a society. The colonial take on this was to reiterate the culture of the elite as superior. Origins of the elite groups were sought from the past, such as those of the Aryans in India, viewed as the elite and the superior culture in colonial scholarship and later in Indian writing as well. The current concerns with origins, both of the Hindus and of Hinduism, is a continuation of colonial thinking. In Indian sources, the term Aryan referred to those that were to be respected, irrespective of their origins.

These did not have to be people of the upper castes. Monks for instance, even if they were of the lower castes, were nevertheless addressed as aryas.

Both, the idea of Pakistan and of Hindu Rashtra, that took shape at about the same time around the 1930s, are again derived from colonial interpretations of Indian history as propounded in the two nation theory. There was some self-reflection among anti-colonial nationalists who rejected some aspects of the colonial interpretations, but the general framework continued. From about the 1950s this began to be questioned by historians. Such questioning was seen as a threat by those still projecting colonial views, as were some politicians in Pakistan and the supporters of Hindutva in India who supported the two-nation theory. The concept of an India that is for, by and of, the Hindus, treated therefore as primary citizens, draws its legitimacy as political enterprise from the colonial construction of India as consisting of two nations, the Hindu and the Muslim.

The countries of South Asia have inherited a history written by colonial historians and some of their contemporary South Asian associates. One of the by-products of this history is the continuing perception in these countries that the identity of each comes from the majority religious community. The politics of religious majoritarianism, of course, denies both democratic functioning and a secular society. This is the point at which the countries of South Asia have to decide what kind of society they want.