A Republic in the Making: India in the 1950s

摘要

This relatively compact but wide-ranging introduction to 1950s India, as its tide suggests, explores the nation-building processes that helped to shape the new republic politically in the years immediately following Independence from British rule in 1947. In the process, it considers key issues that nowadays, over 70 years later, regularly preoccupy historians and other social scientists as they seek to make sense of India's early post-colonial (re-)fashioning. These questions encompass the "unfinished business of Partition" (Chapter 1); India's reconstruction as "political space" (Chapter 2); the "uncertain journey" of its democratic institutions (Chapter 3); the challenge of crafting inclusive citizenship (Chapter 4); and attempts at building economic self-reliance through the introduction of planned development initiatives (Chapter 5). However, as Kudaisya emphasises in his Preface, its five chapters do not collectively constitute "a linear biography of the nation": instead, they seek to accommodate the "twists and turns" of a key period that witnessed "both backward and forward strides" and which was often "marked by uncertainties about the future".