Modern India is the world's largest democracy, a sprawling, polyglot nation containing one-sixth of all humankind. The existence of such a complex and distinctive democratic regime qualifies as one of the world's bona fide political miracles. Furthermore, India's leading political thinkers have often served as its most influential political actors--think of Gandhi, whose collected works run to more than ninety volumes, or Ambedkar, or Nehru, who recorded their most eloquent theoretical reflections at the same time as they strove to set the delicate machinery of Indian democracy on a coherent and just path. Out of the speeches and writings of these thinker-activists, Ramachandra Guha has built the first major anthology of Indian social and political thought.

Prologue: Thinking through India -- Part 1: The opening of the Indian mind -- The first liberal : Rammohan Roy -- Part 2: Reformers and radicals -- The Muslim modernist : Syed Ahmad Khan -- The agrarian radical : Jotirao Phule -- The liberal reformer : G. K. Gokhale -- The militant nationalist : Bal Gangadhar Tilak -- The subaltern feminist : Tarabai Shinde -- Part 3: Nurturing a nation -- The multiple agendas of M. K. Gandhi -- The rooted cosmopolitan : Rabindranath Tagore -- The annihilator of caste : B. R. Ambedkar -- The Muslim separatist : Muhammad Ali Jinnah -- The radical reformer : E. V. Ramaswamy -- The socialist feminist : Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay -- The renewed agendas of M. K. Gandhi -- Part 4: Debating democracy -- The wise democrat : B. R. Ambedkar -- The multiple agendas of Jawaharlal Nehru -- The Hindu supremacist : M. S. Golwalkar -- The indigenous socialist : Rammanohar Lohia -- The grassroots socialist : Jayaprakash Narayan -- The Gandhian liberal : C. Rajagopalachari -- The defender of the triblas : Verrier Elwin -- Part 5: A tradition re-affirmed -- The last modernist : Hamid Dalwai -- Epilogue : India in the world.