We had concluded the first half of this two part article with the following lines: Though 1857 was a battle that did not succeed in freeing the subcontinent from the yoke of imperialism but it achieved two things, it created, for the first time, an over-arching idea of India in its nascent form, an idea that was to lay the foundations of a pluralistic all- encompassing identity of every resident of India as a Hindustani and it created the broad outlines along which the idea of a democratic, secular and inclusive polity was to take shape in the decades to follow. We will, in this concluding part, look at the broad processes which were to nurture this idea of inclusiveness.
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