In this volume, one of India's foremost political scientists offers a richly detailed and critical analysis of Indian politics in the fifty years since independence. Using a variety of genres--essays, book reviews, commentaries and journal entries--Partha Chatterjee scans the entire period from the Nehru era through the through the regimes of Indira and Rajiv Gandhi to the present. He attempts to develop a true perspective on democracy in India, not in the cliche-ridden sense of government of, by, and for the people, but as politics of the governed.
Partha Chatterjee is a political theorist and historian. He studied at Presidency College in Calcutta, and received his Ph.D. from the University of Rochester. He divides his time between Columbia University and the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, where he was the Director from 1997 to 2007. He is the author of more than twenty books, monographs and edited volumes and is a founding member of the Subaltern Studies Collective. He as awarded the Fukuoka Asian Culture Prize for 2009 for outstanding achievements in the field of Asian studies. He is also a poet, playwright, and actor. In the Mira Nair film The Namesake (2007), he played the role of “A Reformed Hindoo.”