The postcolonial compulsions to grapple with or outgrow the memories and legacies of colonialism have produced a teasingly rich body of writings. If colonial experience called for negotiations and repudiations, their postcolonial interrogations have re-visited those sites for new answers and new fulfillments. The unshackling of the colonial world has raised doubts about the phenomenon itself; it has reviewed or redefined the historical experience of subjugation and the struggles to overcome it; and it has sought to come to terms with the brave new world it believed to have conjured up. The making and management of the new nation-states were not any less challenging than the obstetrics of decolonization. Srirupa Roy’s book, is a significant intervention in locating and making sense of the ways which the new Indian state used to craft its nationhood.
It essentially reviews the Nehruvian stances of ordering a nation out of peoples in the new context of colonial retreat, but visualizes them not so much as the ways of a leader as the monitored self-perceptions of an emergent and emerging nation-state.
It is, as the author assures us somewhat playfully, an unfashionable book about history ‘from above’, of capital city, powerful elites and dominant institutions that offered many inspirations of boredom and dust while trying to comprehend bureaucratic jargons,