There can be few scholars working anywhere in the world today with Partha Chatterjee’s sustained record of close intellectual engagement with India’s political economy and its place in the colonial and postcolonial worlds. As is well known, his interests also range widely over issues in social and cultural history, from rural mentalities to bourgeois forms of religious belief, from the role of discourse in shaping the tools of government and law, to the survival strategies of the poor excluded from the benefits of market reforms.

His interests have also been strongly comparative, including compelling accounts of the technocratic detachment of modern postcolonial states from what he calls the “people-nation”, the great mass of their citizenry. “Political society” emerges to fill the space: an arena for political contestation in which their huge populations of urban poor are able to seek rights and recognition outside formal state institutions. A leading voice of scholarly reflection and critique, much of his recent work explores the growth of populist support for forms of strong-man rule in India and across the world.

Chatterjee’s new book, For a Just Republic: The People of India and the State, offers a critical exploration of the subcontinent’s history since the 1930s that is by...

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