In this book Ashis Nandy, one of South Asia’s foremost public intellectuals, grapples with India’s political culture by looking from new perspectives at the country’s past, and by envisioning for the subcontinent a variety of alternative futures. He is able to do this by sidestepping the discipline of history and the ideological apparatus of the modern state. He argues that academic history and the state are overly reliant on three key categories—secularism, modern scientific rationality, and the social-evolutionist idea of progress. Nandy contends, in contrast, that although ordinary Indians possess the democratic right to political choice, they have been prevented from bringing into the centre of India’s public life the everyday categories and thought processes with which they actually live.