Includes bibliographical references (p. 217-241) and index.

When in 1948 the British departed from their most prized imperial possession, handing over the Indian state they created in 1947 to a small nationalist elite led by Nehru, the new country was driven by a belief in a political construct: the idea of India. This political idea animated the Indians' efforts to unite a huge, diverse, and poor society and to transform it into a modern state fit to join the irreversible movement of world history.

Sunil Khilnani's exciting study addresses the paradoxes and ironies that have surrounded the project of inventing India -- a project that has brought Indians great political freedoms and carried their enormous democracy to the verge of being Asia's greatest free state, but one that has also left many Indians in poverty and is now threatened by religious nationalism.

This brilliant historical analysis conveys the energy, fluidity, and unpredictability of modern India -- in its democracy and its voting patterns, in its visions of economic development, in its diverse cities and devotion to village culture, and in its current disputes over its political identity. Throughout his discussion of these central themes, Khilnani provokes and illuminates this fundamental question: Can the original idea of India survive its own successes?