The call not to collapse the people and the state, to keep them separate, is reported in our newspapers frequently these days. Artists, for instance, have insisted on this distinction on the platform of several award shows: ‘It’s my obligation as a Jewish person to distinguish Jews from the state of Israel’, said one (Times of India, 16.09.25). The decision not to end the Russian-Ukrainian war, which has already consumed more than 1,400,000 people (total casualties including military ones, as per the guardian.com/world/2025/jun222), is made by the Russian state, in the name of the Russian people, but are these not two separate entities?
Not to elide the distinction between the state-nation and the people-nation is the main motif of Partha Chatterjee’s latest offering to the world of Indian politics. In his book, which is divided into two main parts—the ‘Nation-State’, and the ‘People-Nation’, with four chapters each—Chatterjee argues that the history of the Indian nation-state is not the same as the vernacular histories of the various peoples of India. The nation-state in India developed on the basis of imperial, bureaucratic and legal institutions largely inherited from the colonial period’ (p. 2). The people, on the other hand, developed a consciousness of being nationalities through a mobilization based on their languages. The leaders of the freedom struggle in India realized that the different peoples of India could be mobilized politically in their regional languages—it is the history of the development of these languages: Tamil, Telugu, Odia, Assamese, Bengali, Marathi and Hindi, to name just a few, that reveals the coalescence of a people around a regional identity: ‘the consciousness of large democratic solidarities was grounded in regional languages…the effective political space of the popular was created separately by each major Indian language’ (pp. 16, 72). This is what makes a robust federalism the most suitable institutional structure for the people to govern themselves.
Not only does Chatterjee provide us with a review of these vernacular histories, something he has also done in his earlier work, he attempts to link this cultural moment with the story of the economic development of India as well. Writing about the trajectory of the Indian Republic, he focuses on three different periods of what he calls the ‘passive revolution of capital’ in India—from Independence to the Emergency, from 1977 to 1991, and post 1991. In this analysis, he contrasts the economic development of a high growth region like Tamil Nadu with another such region, Gujarat, arguing that Tamil sub-nationalism has led to Tamil Nadu becoming a region of high growth with more equality, unlike Gujarat, which has ‘shockingly’ low human development indicators in India, in spite of high growth rates. In Tamil Nadu, capital has developed internally, with the establishment of more medium and small enterprises. He remarks on the broad base of entrepreneurship in Tamil Nadu, with OBCs owning 68%, Dalits owning 14%, and elite groups owning 18% of private enterprises. ‘Tamil Nadu has the highest share of workers in manufacturing among all Indian states…It also has a lower rate of both rural and urban poverty than Maharashtra and Gujarat’ (pp. 350, 347). This is the evidence Chatterjee provides for arguing ‘that human development indicators are significantly better in States that have a strong regional identity’—sub-nationalism leads to better welfare outcomes (pp. 372, 344). Thus, he knits together both kinds of variables, cultural as well as economic, to describe different paths to development in the various linguistic regions of India.
Over his long career as an academic and scholar, Chatterjee has now come to the conclusion that we have to ‘set aside arguments that claim that no justice will be found unless capitalism itself is abolished’ (p. 371). He acknowledges that the primitive accumulation of capital in India has created an enormous informal sector, ‘its own outside’. With such masses of people thrown into this informal economy for their survival, ‘production and service units in the informal sector are allowed to violate tax, labour or pollution laws that apply to the formal sector’ (p. 126); what we can see here is capitalist development in India leading to the emergence of ‘political society’. This book, he says, is about ‘improving our Republic, not replacing it’. So he gives us examples of capitalist growth in regions of India that have achieved more equitable results.
This is a comprehensive history of contemporary India, beginning with colonial times, but focusing more on the trajectory after Independence. The book is full of perceptive insights like the discussion of the different terms used in Indian languages for the terms ‘nation’ and ‘state’—desam and arasu in Tamil, jati and rashtra in Bengali, and the implications of that (p. 17); an analysis of the stability of India’s federal democracy if the ‘Hindu ethnic group’ (80% of the population) is mobilized, or alternatively, if the ‘Hindi ethnic group’ (slightly less than 40% of the population) is focused on as the largest linguistic group (p. 288). There is also a fascinating discussion on the difference between an understanding of the norm as the empirical average or as the normative. If the norm is taken as the empirical average, then the position of India’s women citizens has improved in terms of rising literacy rates and better health indicators. However, if we understand the norm as a normative standard, then there has been much less change in the normative standards that are applied to women and men in independent India (pp. 392-3). All of these observations have been combined, in a larger clear argument about the mismatch between the cultural form of the people-nation and the state form. Chatterjee argues that to rectify ‘the structural failure in adequately tailoring the inherited state to fit the cultural form of the people-nation in India…a more equal and meaningful federal process is crucial’ (pp. 45, 427).
The book is a major contribution not only because it weaves together so many moments from India’s post-Independence history into a larger argument about the people form and the state form, but also because, while doing so, Chatterjee has managed to discuss a large corpus of recent literature from Indian sociology, politics, and economics. The book has done us a service in providing so many leads in terms of both arguments and literature, and we can follow any of these depending on our interest.
It is certainly a book rich with insights, therefore it might seem like quibbling, but sometimes, although infrequently, and more towards the end, it feels as if the stitching together of so many events is somewhat forced. It is a difficult task to fit together so many events—Indian history is certainly eventful, if not anything else—so just once in a while the reader might wonder if an event might have been left out of the discussion. I also think that the chapter on the general concepts of procedural and substantive justice was not as engaging as the other chapters; in contrast, I found the chapter which discussed Ambedkar’s analysis of the injustice faced by different minority groups in India more compelling. Other than that, it is a wonderful read, from which one has much to learn. In early modern political theory, the state emerged to rectify the problem of a multitude not being able to act—the people can only authorize, not act, wrote Hobbes in the Leviathan, because they are too many. But the people do act in the pages of Chatterjee’s book: they coalesce around their region’s languages; they set up economic enterprises, and they protest against the failures of the state. We have before us a remarkable story of the people acting in the direction of justice in the space of the Indian republic.
Shefali Jha is with the Centre for Political Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University.