India has just passed the 75th year of its birth as a republic. We see this as an occasion to take stock of how the social science and the humanities disciplines, as well as interdisciplinary fields, have evolved in India, and where we can and should go from here. This volume brings together scholars trained in different disciplines reflecting on how India—and the generic political form of the nation—has figured as an object of knowledge and a site of critical reflection in the last hundred years or so. The idea is to use the nation both as a frame and an object of critique—to explore how disciplines evolve within this frame while disassembling and reassembling the nation itself. We believe that for Indian academics, this might be the most fruitful public intervention they can make in the time of state celebrations.

Modern categories of social scientific and humanist reflection historically evolved in the nineteenth century in a world that was being reshaped by colonialism and its political twin, nationalism. Culture, society, state, literature, art, economy, and so on came to be posited as objects/fields of study, co-incidental to national boundaries—hence, common usages like Indian society, Indian art, Indian economy, and so on. And yet, the analytical mechanisms by which these different concepts/objects came to be ‘nationalized’ varied, as did the protocols of the disciplines earmarked for the study of these distinct objects/fields. Take the example of how art and economy came to be differently disciplined. Art and economics share the conception of ‘value’, but they understand value in mutually opposed ways.