caa a22 4500 386390088 CHVBK 20190822074120.0 cr unu---uuuuu 161130e198905 xx s 000 0 eng 10.1017/S0026749X00001049 doi S0026749X00001049 pii (NATIONALLICENCE)cambridge-10.1017/S0026749X00001049 Thapar Romila Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi Imagined Religious Communities? Ancient History and the Modern Search for a Hindu Identity [Elektronische Daten] [Romila Thapar] My choice of subject for this lecture arose from what I think might have been a matter of some interest to Kingsley Martin; as also from my own concern that the interplay between the past and contemporary times requires a continuing dialogue between historians working on these periods. Such a dialogue is perhaps more pertinent to post-colonial societies where the colonial experience changed the framework of the comprehension of the past from what had existed earlier: a disjuncture which is of more than mere historiographical interest. And where political ideologies appropriate this comprehension and seek justification from the pre-colonial past, there, the historian's comment on this process is called for. Among the more visible strands in the political ideology of contemporary India is the growth and acceptance of what are called communal ideologies. ‘Communal', as many in this audience are aware, in the Indian context has a specific meaning and primarily perceives Indian society as constituted of a number of religious communities. Communalism in the Indian sense therefore is a consciousness which draws on a supposed religious identity and uses this as the basis for an ideology. It then demands political allegiance to a religious community and supports a programme of political action designed to further the interests of that religious community. Such an ideology is of recent origin but uses history to justify the notion that the community (as defined in recent history) and therefore the communal identity have existed since the early past. Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1989 Modern Asian Studies Cambridge University Press 23/2(1989-05), 209-231 0026-749X 23:2<209 1989 23 ASS https://doi.org/10.1017/S0026749X00001049 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI 1 research-article jats NATIONALLICENCE 856 40 https://doi.org/10.1017/S0026749X00001049 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI NATIONALLICENCE 100 1- Thapar Romila Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi NATIONALLICENCE 773 0- Modern Asian Studies Cambridge University Press 23/2(1989-05), 209-231 0026-749X 23:2<209 1989 23 ASS CC0 http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0 nationallicence SWISSBIB 386390088 BK010053 XK010053 XK010000 NATIONALLICENCE NATIONALLICENCE NL-cambridge