Reinventing India

This volume examines the history of modern India and its contemporary transformation, providing an account of the changes which are shaking India today at the beginning of the 21st century. When India was invented as a "modern" country in the years after Independence in 1947, it styled itself as a secular, federal, democratic Republic committed to an ideology of development. Nehru's India never quite fulfilled this promise, but more recently his vision of India has been challenged by two "elite revolts": those of economic liberalization and Hindu nationalism. These, in turn, have been challenged by various movements from below, including those of India's "backward classes". The democratic spaces of India have been exploited by these movements to challenge for power and to contest prevailing accounts of politics, the state and modernity. Part I of the book describes India's transformation under colonial rule, and the ideas and social forces which underlay the deliberations of the Constituent Assembly which was convened in 1946 to consider the shaping of the postcolonial state.