The Nation Betrayed

While agreeing in substance with Ramachandra Guha's critique of expatriate Indian intellectuals, that commentary is extended here to (a) point to an important impediment in their intellectual project coming in the way of their taking their migrant status seriously and hence interrogating their milieu with greater rigour; and (b) reply to grounded patriots that there are other legitimate albeit unstable locations from which to construct a social science. Turning to Guhaâ??s peculiar smugness about 'relevance', it is argued that in talking of discourse and deployment of power within intellectual communities, the nation may not be the only legitimate category of analysis.