Rumi Nations

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v34/n13/perry-anderson/gandhi-centre-stage Excerpts: All countries have fond images of themselves, and big countries, inevitably, have bigger heads than others.  The subcontinent as we know it today never formed a single political or cultural unit in premodern times.   The ‘idea of India’ was a European not a local invention, as the name itself makes clear.  When the British arrived, it was the sprawling heterogeneity of the area that allowed them, after a slow start, to gain such relatively swift and easy control of it, using one local power or population against the next, in a series of alliances and annexations that ended, more than a century after the Battle of Plassey, with the construction of an empire extending further east and south, if not north-west, than any predecessor.  The mutineers in Delhi having sought restoration of Mughal power, Muslims were suspect as recruits thereafter, becoming the exception in an army bas...