"But Sarkar is also being a ventriloquist here. The deliberate mixing of his authorial voice with that of the Maratha envoy produces a cultivated ambiguity, but the two types of patriotism can be analytically separated. The Maratha envoy’s anguish would not have been tied in any way to a modern sense of, or a desire for, the nation. But then again, we would also be aware of the ambiguity of the word nation that allowed Sarkar to thus mix up sentiments belonging to very different historical periods. He would say of the “Jat state” during the “prudent reigns of Badan Singh and Suraj Mal” that its prospects of enjoying “a period of peaceful recuperation and progress” were destroyed by factors internal to the community: “A nation’s greatest enemy is within, not without.” Similarly, “internal quarrels and lack of statesmanship and even of intelligent self-interest among their leaders …so often ruined the national cause of the Marathas.”"