The Indian Ideology: Three Responses to Perry Anderso

When the Marxist historian Perry Anderson published The Indian Ideology - his scathing assessment of India's democracy, secularism, nationalism and statehood - it created a furore. Anderson attacked subcontinental unity as a myth, castigated Mahatma Gandhi for infusing Hindu religiosity into nationalism, blamed Congress for Partition and saw India's liberal intelligentsia as by and large a feckless lot.Within the large array of responses to Anderson that appeared, three stand out for the care and comprehensiveness with which they show the levels of ignorance, arrogance and misconstruction on which the Andersonian variety of political analysis is based.