Since the modern era brings a multiplicity of identities that hinges on nation, region, class, gender, language, citizenship – identity is always negotiated within a flow of multiple influences. Our identity has therefore two dimensions, ‘ontological’ and ‘epistemological’ – the former refers to we are and the latter to who we think we are. The two necessarily shape each other and ‘our identity is a constant and dialectical interplay between them’. The modern subject is thus defined ‘by its insertion into a series of separate value spheres – each one of which tends to exclude or attempts to assert its priority over the rest’. So, individual identity can never be permanently fixed, but is in constant flux for socio-cultural and political reasons. One of the instances of a radical shift in identity was certainly the outcome of the divisive politics articulated in the 1947 partition of the subcontinent of India. People’s identity as Indians, as Asians or as members of the human race, writes Amartya Sen, seemed to give way – quite suddenly – to sectarian identification with Hindu, Muslim or Sikh communities. The broadly Indian of January was rapidly and unquestioningly transformed into the narrowly Hindu or finely Muslim of March. The carnage that followed had much to do with unreasoned herd behaviour by which people, as it were, ‘discovered’ their new divisive and belligerent identities and failed to subject the process to critical examination. The same people were suddenly different. The contemporary debate on communal identity revolves around concerns in two complementary directions, First, as a community, Indians ‘lack’ or have lost identity, or it has become diluted, eroded, corrupted or confused. As a corollary to the first, the obvious concern is therefore how to retain, preserve or strengthen the sense of identity. What is thus emphasized is a ‘belief’ that identity consists in being different from others and is invariably diluted by intercultural borrowing, that an identity is historically fixed, that it is the sole source of political legitimacy, that the state’s primary task is to maintain it and that national identity defines the limits of permissible diversity.