Indians

A Political Biography

What can we learn from India’s postcolonial experience of fashioning a democracy despite its extensive poverty, entrenched inequalities and widespread illiteracy?

With India under growing scrutiny over the erosion of its democracy since 2014, worldwide media coverage has revealed our poor grasp of it as a modern nation. In this book, Indrajit Roy sets out to understand modern Indians on their own terms. Beyond the usual polarising narratives—either pious platitudes to the ‘world’s largest democracy’, or laments over its ‘democratic backsliding’— Roy reveals the remarkable 75-year achievement of building a democratic nation in a country weathering mass poverty, severe inequality and deep social conflict. He also exposes how this process unfolds on the ground, telling the story of a nation-state via glimpses into how Indians have thought of themselves, the world and their place in it.

Indians charts the evolution of a people’s identity since the spectacle, frenzy and hope of independence in 1947, and the republican constitution introduced in 1950. This is both a high-political history and, more importantly, an account of that history’s interplay with the nebulous complex of ideas and passions that go into making, unmaking and remaking a democratic nation.

Roy’s astute political biography of the Indian people is, ultimately, a tale of how one democracy influences, and is shaped by, its economy, society and culture.

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