His conception of India’s history—as a coherent narrative containing and driven by the conflicting internal logics of accommodation and oppression—was innovative and intellectually acute. It was also a political riposte to British instincts. The British had long contended that India’s pre-colonial history lacked unity or particular meaning, and that without British rule to enforce cohesion, there would have been no India to speak of. This high imperial ideology is briskly encapsulated in one of Churchill’s famous slights: that India had no more claim to being considered a country than did the
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