This book brings together some of the most significant and best-known writings of Partha Chatterjee. It includes his pathbreaking interventions in the theoretical analysis of nationalism, as well as several of his pieces on the political, intellectual, and cultural history of nationalism.

The volume also contains Chatterjee’s provocative and theoretically innovative essays analysing the phenomenon of democracy in a post-colonial country like India. There are also examples of his early engagement with agrarian politics, and his life-long participation in the project of Subaltern Studies.

A special feature of this book is the sampling it provides of Partha Chatterjee’s best short journalistic pieces, of humorous and stylistically brilliant book reviews, and the first translations into English of some of his Bengali essays. This is the most comprehensive single volume encompassing the full range of the work of one of India’s most original social scientists.

An Introduction by Nivedita Menon (Professor of Politics at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi), outlines and critiques Chatterjee’s ideas, their range, their importance, and their influence in political thought today.

Partha Chatterjee is Professor of Political Science at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, and Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University, New York. He is a founder-member of ‘Subaltern Studies’. His several books include The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (1993), A Princely Impostor? The Kumar of Bhawal and the Secret History of Indian Nationalism (2002), and The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World (2004).