I believe that this is one of the most intelligent and articulate books on Indian politics ever written. Sunil Khilnani, a professor of politics at Cambridge, brings unyielding subtlety and sophistication in a book which well matches the complexity and contradictions of Indian politics. He artfully demonstrates and corrects such simplistic and prevalent misconceptions as surrounding the nature and origins of India's early state-led industrialization or the nature of its democracy.

A somewhat longish extract will illustrate the subtleties of various concepts that the author elegantly develops in this magnificient work:

QUOTE In India, democracy has had to function in a society of peculiar complexity where many different temporal and historical plans coexist. Indian continues to be a predominantly agrarian society, whose people are not indifferent to religion, and where the individual does not have a strong political or social presence. But towering over that society today is the state. This state is far from supremely effective: it regulalry fails to protect its citizens against physical violence, it does not provide them with welfare, and it has not fulfilled its extensive ambitions to transform Indian society. Yet it is today at the very centre of the Indian political imagination. Until little over a century ago, the social order of caste had made the state largely redundant...The past fifty years have trenchantly displayed the powers of the state and of the idea of democracy to reconstitute the antique social identities of India - caste and religion - and to force them to face and enter politics.
UNQUOTE

If you have wondered why so many books have failed to effectively unravel and interpret the intricacies of political evolution of this entity called India, Khilnani's analysis will be a welcome eye opener.