This relatively compact but wide-ranging introduction to 1950s India, as its title suggests, explores the nation-building processes that helped to shape the new republic politically in the years immediately following Independence from British rule in 1947. In the process, it considers key issues that nowadays, over 70 years later, regularly preoccupy historians and other social scientists as they seek to make sense of India's early post-colonial (re-)fashioning. These questions encompass the “unfinished business of Partition” (Chapter 1); India's reconstruction as “political space” (Chapter 2); the “uncertain journey” of its democratic institutions (Chapter 3); the challenge of crafting inclusive citizenship (Chapter 4); and attempts at building economic self-reliance through the introduction of planned development initiatives (Chapter 5). However, as Kudaisya emphasises in his Preface, its five chapters do not collectively constitute “a linear biography of the nation”: instead, they seek to accommodate the “twists and turns” of a key period that witnessed “both backward and forward strides” and which was often “marked by uncertainties about the future” (p. viii).

Central to the political drama of the ‘long’ 1950s, A Republic in the Making argues, was an acute and visible tension between “the nebulous idea of being an Indian and the deep-seated hold of pre-existing identities” (p. ix). Kudaisya highlights the impact of this, first by exploring how far violence continued to be targeted against minorities, in particular Muslims, and the consequences of this for their struggles to belong, alongside the state-led rehabilitation of non-Muslim refugees who had crossed over from what had become Pakistan, and how far Partition's legacies affected the constitutional framing of citizenship. Moving onto what defined the external and internal map of independent India, he next explains the processes involved in boundary-making of these years, from the impact of Radcliffe Award of the summer of 1947 itself, which established the new frontiers separating India from Pakistan, to the largely inevitable though not uncontroversial internal integration of princely states (Kashmir included), and then the 1956 reorganisation of the administrative units (states) that comprised the Indian Union, a move that he credits with providing “a stable foundation upon which India's federal structure could rest” (p. 68). This assessment is followed by an overview of the way in which ideas about India's nascent democracy were implemented in practice, with a particular focus on the deliberations in the Constituent Assembly as it finalised the new constitution (1950), and also the various party institutions that emerged along the political spectrum during the period under scrutiny. The discussion then returns to the knotty problem of citizenship—a particularly important topic for historians of early post-independence South Asia—and indicates where secularism, Indian citizenship laws, and linguistic diversity (together with English, the language of India's former colonial masters) all fitted into the new (citizen) ‘equation’. Again the conclusion reached is a largely positive one: that these “three interrelated developments helped establish an inclusive framework of citizenship in the new Republic” (p. 113). Finally, with the emphasis still on where efforts were taking place to promote integration, Kudaisya contextualises contemporary debates regarding development, and where and how the various plans that these generated addressed the challenges faced by independent India, in the countryside as well as in its industrialising urban centres.

A Republic in the Making, therefore, provides a generally upbeat assessment of the business of nation-building in 1950s India, both in the short run as well as over the longer term. Few would question that, as Kudaisya proposes, India was “transformed in seminal ways between the years 1947 and 1962”, defying “prophesies of disintegration and collapse” (p. xii) to become (comparatively-speaking) “a thriving democracy, anchored by a stable state” (p. 176). On the other hand, viewed from the perspective of the second decade of the twenty-first century, more critical observers of India's political landscape today might query just how much of the “integrative revolution”—Kudaisya's preferred description of how pre-existing identities came to be reconciled with ideas of being Indian during the 1950s (p. xii)—still survives, and so perhaps wonder whether India remains as much “at ease” with its “diversity and heterogeneity” (p. 176) as Kudaisya's optimistic summing-up would suggest. This point aside, this study offers a very useful (and highly accessible) point of departure for readers interested in better understanding the complex challenges faced by India as it embarked on its journey to fully-fledged independent statehood.