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The radicalism of the early Jawaharlal Nehru shows through particularly in speeches aimed at rousing the young. For example, in his presidential address to the Bombay Presidency Youth Conference in 1928, Nehru proclaimed: We must aim, therefore, at the destruction of all imperialism and the reconstruction of society on another basis. Our national ideal must, therefore, be the establishment of a cooperative socialist commonwealth and our international ideal, a world federation of socialist states.

15 the “civic virtues” associated with developing notions of citizenship in the United Kingdom, and that it is also able to position itself as central in relation to a developing civilizational discourse associated with new ideas of Indian citizenship. BAPS is a sophisticated transnational organization. He argues that it deploys its transnational organizational resources in order to adapt core values of social service (seva) and a form of “cosmopolitan Hinduism” to these different national contexts, producing flexible and interrelated hybrid concepts that also draw on developing notions of religion in global arenas.

Such an approach provides an alternative perspective to common views of development and acculturation, the former often portrayed as a stage-by-stage process and the latter, usually described as the wholesale adaptation to an emulated culture. Instead, as Taylor concludes, “we should not think of transitions as different routes to the same (at least hoped-for) end point, a stable democracy of a normal kind. ” (Taylor 2007: 121) Furthermore, as Homi Bhabha and others have pointed out, the accepted wisdom of acculturation and development disregards the agency of the members of the receiving society and their active role in shaping asymmetrical cultural contacts.