Synopsis Nation, community, religion and language are the main themes which run through the writings in this volume of Subaltern Studies. Sudipta Kaviraj identifies some of the narrative modes through which the nationalist consciousness in India imagined a historical past for the nation. Partha Chatterjee looks at the way the new middle class of Calcutta constructed the figure of Sri Ramakrishna. Ranjit Guha discusses the use of caste sanctions in the Swadeshi and Non-Cooperation Movements. Saurabh Dube does a detailed reading of twentieth-century text on the myths of Ghasidas and Balakdas, the gurus of the Satnami sect. Using a set of twelfth-century Judaeo-Arabic documents from Cairo, Amitav Ghosh does an imaginative reconstruction of the careers of a Jewish merchant in Mangalore and his Indian slave. Terence Ranger offers a number of insights from the history of Zimbabwe into the dynamic connections between small and large solidarities. Upendra Baxi takes up two earlier essays by Ranajit Guha and Shahid Amin to make a critical analysis of the place of law in the study of subaltern activity and consciousness.