Sekhar Bandyopadhyay's well-researched and well-written study adds another useful title to his earlier works on the history of South Asia, especially Bengal. It focuses on the first five years of the political situation in independent India and examines organized institutional politics, mass agitations, and individual opinions in the media, with a view toward discerning “how the meanings of freedom were contested by the new citizens of West Bengal,” comprising the rural folks, urban workers, and middle and upper classes, the intellectuals, the literati, as well as the politicians (p. 5). Bandyopadhyay questions the existence of a preexisting political consensus on the future of the new state as postulated by contemporary observers and critics, and instead argues that “the process of building a modern nation in India … was not over, but only entered a different phase in 1947” (p. 6).

A major concern of the author has to do with the influential Orientalist assumption that political decolonization does not affect the colonization of the mind. He problematizes colonization as well as modernization to allay Mohandas Gandhi's fear that free India might actually turn up as a country under English rule sans the presence of Englishmen. Bandyopadhyay's extensive research shows how the metropolitan connection was never quite clearly or completely severed, or indelibly imposed on the colonial psyche. On the other hand, colonial contact and impact in India (especially West Bengal) was a dialogic process that needs to be understood by such concepts as alterity or hybridity. Indians did appropriate the Western concepts of modernity and nation building, but they adapted them to their own cultural heritage.

This ambitious study rigorously engages in examining this issue of ambivalence as it was worked out by the politicians and the hoi polloi of postindependent India in six chapters, paying close attention to communal violence (1947–50), political factionalism vitiated by communist insurgency (1948–50), the split in the Indian National Congress between the left and the right, and the first national election of 1952. Bandyopadhyay's book seeks to explain how the recently independent Indians conceived of freedom amid these tumults under a fledgling nation-state. During the heyday of nationalist struggle, the idea of freedom stood for resisting the colonial (foreign) power. However, while decolonization removed the foreign adversaries from the scene, new ones appeared from within the country, resulting in confrontations on multiple fronts: labor versus capital, city versus country, or the contesting ideological assumptions and aspirations of various intellectual groups. Independent India's political and social modernity was thus beset by a sense of incompleteness, ambiguity, acrimony, agony, and anguish.

A problem with Bandyopadhyay's reading of the frustration and discontent that resulted from varying perceptions and expectations of freedom in the initial years of postcolonial Bengal is that it is based on his survey of the repressive measures of the Congress government against workers' and peasants' protests and demands (p. 69). However, these are neither particularly Indian problems nor remarkable evidence of popular discontent. Political and economic demands of the common people have always been perceived by the ruling class or group as disorderly and dangerous. The political and social history of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England and France is replete with outbursts of fury and frustration of the people against their democratic governments.

Bandyopadhyay's gloomy portrayal of divided Bengal (and India) could have been tempered and somewhat nuanced had he used Sudipto Kaviraj's seminal essay on this topic (“Ideas of Freedom in Modern India,” in The Idea of Freedom in Asia and Africa, ed. Robert H. Taylor [Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002], 97–142). Anticipating Bandyopadhyay, Kaviraj concedes that “the history of modern India tells us a complex, surprising, captivating, and yet unconcluded story of freedom.” But unlike Bandyopadhyay, he is confident that even if “the eventual shape of the destination of this process might be unclear, … the movement toward greater expansion of freedom is irreversible” (p. 142). Admittedly, Bandyopadhyay's canvas is limited to the five years following the partition and independence of India, and thus his assessment encompasses the events during this period of transition only. Yet his conclusion, which is qualified by his caution against any “certaintist” stance or “integrated narrative” (p. 7), tends to render his study based on meticulous research somewhat tentative and scattered. Also, for a book of modest length, too many events and episodes crowd its pages, and their densely packed details weigh heavily on the reader's attention in spite of the author's clear and concise prose. Nevertheless, his scholarship, sincerity, and rigorous attention to sources are beyond cavil. Decolonization in South Asia is a fitting sequel to Bandyopadhyay's From Plassey to Partition, published by Longman in 2004.