This project is written as a mission to separate the modern from the contemporaneous, to revisit the idea of modernity and to de-link it from superficial traits of westernization. Discussing the difference between modernization and westoxication, the book is a phenomenological treatment thatis abstract and yet illustrative, when discussing issues such as affirmative action, citizenship, and development in India. This book argues that given the reality of mistaken modernity and the idealization of the past in many societies of the South, it is necessary to make the case for modernity asuncompromisingly as possible.