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.