When the Constituent Assembly forged a Constitution for the new republic of India, it settled for a limited agreement which allowed people from different parts of the country to come together, even while leaving the deep histories of cultural identity to the regions. This points, says Chatterjee, to the varying trajectory of the nation-state – as opposed to the trajectory of what he calls “the people-nation”. One of the core achievements of this book is to analyse the complex connection between the two.