When was the last time we had a book of such breadth and depth on Indian politics? I asked myself this question as I finished reading Partha Chatterjee’s recent book For a Just Republic: The People of India and the State. My mind raced back to Rajni Kothari’s Politics in India, an iconic book published in 1971 that transformed the way we think about the subject. In a similar way, Chatterjee’s latest offering promises to change the way we study Indian politics since Independence.

This much-awaited book weaves together the many threads that Chatterjee has spun over the last four decades in his multiple avatars. Chatterjee, the historian of ideas, had alerted us to the derivative aspects of our nationalist thought. Chatterjee, the ghost writer for Charvak, had busted the myths the Indian nat

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