ABSTRACT
On 15 August 1947, at the moment of the birth of the Indian republic, Premier Jawaharlal Nehru hyperbolically announced to the nation that India’s dark past was over and India’s assignation with nation-making had begun. More importantly, the Indian polity was and is embedded within wider societal structures characterised by divisions along lines of caste, class, region, religion, and gender. Political scientists approach Indian politics with ready-made theoretical frameworks that are often grounded in Eurocentric notions of democracy and nation formation. With the decline of the Congress Party’s political hegemony from the 1970s onwards, many scholars looked at the operation of factions to understand India’s political dynamics. A giant figure among them was Paul Brass, who in his 1965 study Factional Politics in an Indian State proffered possibly one of the very best analyses of the operation of factions in a North Indian polity.
