BACK TO THE PRESENT

Thinking about culture in the humanities is dominated by a historicist approach derived from a nationalist, ’postcolonial ’ consciousness marked by a disavowal of modernity. The study of contemporary culture, in particular the cultural context overdetermined by capitalist processes, shows up the limitations of this paradigm and foregrounds the need for a concept of the contemporary. As a first step towards this goal, the article takes up for analysis certain key ideologemes of modern Indian life which hinge on the sense of a recovery of identity, and tries to demonstrate their inadequacy for a rigorous sense of the present. Key Words ♦ contemporaneity ♦ culture ♦ democracy ♦ modernity ♦ nation A sense of the present is, above all, a matter of arrival. It is a problematic that emerges as much out of the long interregnum of debates about moder-nity in the postcolonial context as it does from the consolidation of th