Trouble is the prophecy written on the wall,

the heartbeat of murderers are

the soaring of bullets

and the cocking of guns

Indoctrinating by cocaine,

their metamorphosize from men

to wolves,

with daggers they terrorize innocence,

and bully silence,

with the hoarseness of violence.

                                                            By Kakraba Afful

What we saw in its place instead was a strange grafting of the Indian identity with an entirely new culture. The British brought with them the English language and Western education, and with such education came the ideas of modern nationalism self-determination and democracy. however these ideas only reached a small elite-- the British consensus was that, on the whole, Indians and their customs were best left alone.

The large majority of Indians were left unmoored, disconnected from both their foreign government and their English-educated Indian leaders, and untouched by the modern economy and liberal ideas around the wold, Colonial India as a result stagnated in terms of income growth, urbanization and education. In fact the British often collaborated with India's traditional elites the lumpen aristocracy, deliberately strength feudal systems. Form Instance, they protected landlords from land transfers to and emerging urban capitalist class, and encouraged the martial, patriarchal systems of the Jats, Bhumihars, Rajputs and Sikhs since these ' warrior Castes' were a significant source of manpower for the British army.

This divide gave rise to a strange, two-tiered cultural hierarchy in India, with such a vast space in between that  the Indian identity seemed a split personality. Many of the elite, upper middle- class Indians who were educated in British schools embraced the Renaissance ideas of democracy, self-determination and nationalism, and several among them became leaders of the national freedom movement, on the other side of the chasm was India's vast majority, defined by the subcontinent's  common culture, dominated by the iron rules of caste, religion and social custom.

There was little in common in ideas across this divide, and India's reformers stood at one bank and stared across, appalled at what they saw. The reformer Bipin Chandra Pal wrote. "We loved the abstraction we called India but.... hated the thing it actually was.'

No one exemplified the divide between India's leaders and the rest of the country more strongly than Jawaharlal Nehru. Understanding him is I think key to understanding the role ideas have had in shaping and uniting the country. In retrospect, Nehru was an odd man to have prevailed in shaping the Indian identity. He had described himself as ' the last Englishman to rule India' - he had grown up under the eye of a Westernized father a successful lawyer and a late convert to the cause of India's independence from the British.

Motilal Nehru insisted on knives and forks at the dining table, spoke in English at home (although his wife did not know the language) and employed British tutors for his children. Nehru was sent to England when he was a teenager, to study in Harrow, then Cambridge and the Inns of Court.

Nehru was thus very much a child of the Western Enlightenment. Even while he admired Gandhi's mass appeal and determination he called him 'as clear-cut as a diamond' - he also disagreed with his more traditional beliefs, once writing, "Ideologically, he [is] sometimes amazingly backward.' he was not religious in the least and responded to questions ab out his faith with a shrug and a quote from Voltaire: 'Even if God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him. ' And he was wary of the political pulls in India, especially after he became the country's first prime minister. While his allegiances to India were clear, he was uncomfortable with its deeply rooted social, regional and caste divisions. The distance between Nehru's personal beliefs and what he experienced in the heart of India was sometimes stark; during a visit to Uttar Pradesh the local congress leader kalka prasad introduced Nehru as the ' New king' and the peasants gathered echoed,' Hte king, the king has arrived', to Nehru's great astonishment and anger.