ABSTRACT
This chapter provides greater emphasis on tracing political development over time, and contextualizing the presence of the Indian state in the lives of India's people-than with detailed description of how the formal institutions of Indian government work. Bal Thackeray's right-wing Shiv Sena party has held a controlling influence in India's largest city since the 1990s, both in and out of power. In 1757, East India Company forces defeated the last independent Nawab of Bengal and his French allies in the Battle of Plassey, a major milestone in British ascendancy. Mohandas K. Gandhi was born in 1869 into a Gujarati Bania family in princely Porbandar on India's west coast, where his father served as chief minister. He studied law in London and led a civil rights movement for Indians in South Africa before returning in 1915 to India, where he became active in the Indian National Congress (INC) and traveled widely to understand the lives of ordinary people.
