published Letters to Chief Ministers 1947–1964(five volumes, Jawaharlal
Nehru Memorial Fund, 1984–9) are usually quite insightful. On the foreign
policy side, new evidence has now been drawn upon by some studies (see
above). Some earlier work is still extremely useful: see for instance G.H.
Jansen, Afro-Asia and Non-Alignment(Faber, 1966), which contains much
material on India and on Nehru; Michael Brecher, India and World Politics:
Krishna Menon’s View of the World(Oxford University Press, 1968), provides
extremely useful material in a series of interviews with Nehru’s main ally and
confidant in foreign policy matters.
For domestic politics, some general narratives exist; but newspaper
reports, partisan political polemics or contemporary writings are often the
best way into it. There is some material on the organisation of the Congress
and the state machinery after independence: see for instance, Myron Weiner,
Party-Building in a New Nation: The Indian National Congress(University of
Chicago Press, 1967); Stanley Kochanek, The Congress Party of India: the
Dynamics of One-Party Democracy(Princeton University Press, 1968); David
C. Potter, India’s Political Administrators 1919–1983(Clarendon Press, 1986);
Suhit Sen, ‘The Transitional State: Congress and Government in UP,
c.1946–57’, unpublished PhD thesis (School of Oriental and African Studies,
University of London, 1998). On the question of language, see Robert D.
King, Nehru and the Language Politics of India(Oxford University Press,
1997); on the Hindu Code, Reba Som, ‘Jawaharlal Nehru and the Hindu
Code Bill: A Victory of Symbol over Substance?’ Modern Asian Studies28(1),- On the prime minister’s role, see the essays in James Manor (ed.),
Nehru to the Nineties: the Changing Office of Prime Minister in India(Hurst,
1994). Surveys of the reasons why India would eventually fall apart, outlining
regional, linguistic, caste and communal tensions, appeared periodically: see
Selig S. Harrison, India: The Most Dangerous Decades(Princeton University
Press, 1960).
The central theme for post-independence India is development: it has
generated much technical literature and much work in the political economy
mode. On the corresponding social and intellectual history, see Benjamin
Zachariah, ‘British and Indian Ideas of “Development”: Decoding Political
Conventions in the Late Colonial State’, Itinerario3–4, 1999; Benjamin
Zachariah, ‘The Development of Professor Mahalanobis’, review article,
Economy and Society26(3), 1997. Post-independence, A.H. Hanson, The
Process of Planning: A Study of India’s Five-Year Plans, 1950–64(Oxford
University Press, 1966) and Francine R. Frankel, India’s Political Economy
1947–1977: The Gradual Revolution(Princeton University Press, 1978) are
detailed narrative accounts. Pranab Bardhan, The Political Economy of
Development in India (Basil Blackwell, 1984); Sukhamoy Chakravarty,
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