India After Gandhi is a magisterial account of the pains, the struggles, the humiliations, and the glories of the world's largest and least likely democracy. Ramachandra Guha offers a breathtaking chronicle of the brutal conflicts that have rocked a giant nation and the extraordinary factors that have held it together.

This intricately researched and elegantly written epic history is populated with larger-than-life characters, making it the work of a major scholar at the peak of his abilities. Guha provides fresh insights into the lives and public careers of India's long-serving prime ministers and other significant figures, painting vivid sketches of major "provincial" leaders and lesser-known yet important Indians—peasants, tribals, women, workers, and musicians.

Moving between history and biography, this story of modern India is both a riveting chronicle and a definitive history of a country that has defied numerous prophets of doom.

What makes people love and die for nations, as well as hate and kill in their name? While many studies have been written on nationalist political movements, the sense of nationality—the personal and cultural feeling of belonging to a nation—has not received proportionate attention.

In this widely acclaimed work, Benedict Anderson examines the creation and global spread of the 'imagined communities' of nationality. Anderson explores the processes that created these communities: the territorialization of religious faiths, the decline of antique kingship, the interaction between capitalism and print, the development of vernacular languages-of-state, and changing conceptions of time.

He shows how an originary nationalism born in the Americas was modularly adopted by popular movements in Europe, by the imperialist powers, and by the anti-imperialist resistances in Asia and Africa.

This revised edition includes two new chapters, one of which discusses the complex role of the colonialist state's mindset in the development of Third World nationalism, while the other analyses the processes by which, all over the world, nations came to imagine themselves as old.