late Indians were willing to collaborate with the colonial administration. However, a shift from collaboration to criticism began in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Two broad movements emerged among Hindus seeking to define their national identity: modernists and revivalists. The modernists adopted models of social and political change based upon Western patterns; they appreciated many of the Western philosophies and wanted India to follow suit. The revivalist view was based on returning to a Hindu antiquity that was thought to be superior for governing India-a "Hindu" nation. Many felt that this desire to recreate the age of Hindu grandeur was also a result of English education; ideas of patriotism and nationalism crept into these peoples way of thought. It was the English study of the Indian way of life that added to the revivalist movement. Revivalism included those who wanted to preserve the traditional social order as well as those who sought to reform Hindu society as a way of strengthening Hindu solidarity. The RSS traces its roots to the revivalist feelings that were present at that time.
             The Hindu revivalists sought to recover fundamental truths about their people. They argued that the loss of national consciousness had created conditions that facilitated British domination of the land. By appealing to an idealized past, the revivalists reminded the Hindu public of the suffering and degradation experienced under British rule. The call for independence was a logical next-step, for the degraded present could only be overcome by eliminating the foreign intruders who had supposedly disrupted the original blissful society. Muslim rulers and the British were identified as sources of that disruption and many revivalist spokesmen sought to place limits on their political power and on their cultural influence. The proposed changes in Hindu society were justified by the proposition that the changes we...