The British had created the framework of a modern state in India. The carving out of a well defined territorial space with fixed boundaries, the establishment of British sovereignty and the proclamation of British responsibility for the well being of the people within this territory, the equality of all citizens before the law helped to bestow the trappings of a modern state on India. But this state was not yet a nation. A nation could emerge from the state when a majority of its population came to share a sense of common belonging in a community or participate in the idea of a shared destiny. The transition from state to nation is not a foreordained process and does not take place in a straightforward teleological fashion. The crucial gap between the formation of the state and that of the nation may be overcome in various ways: but the final end is to foster the feeling of belonging to a collectivity. Language, territory, religion, race, ethnicity, shared history, culture and values: actors imbricated in the formation of identities have to be utilized and manipulated in order to fashion a homogenous identity from within which internal tensions are ironed out. The nationalist claim to sovereign nationhood can then be staked on the basis of this shared identity.