In the mid 1970s, if you were an undergraduate studying history at an Indian university, you would have been encouraged by your teachers to explain social change by correlating it with economic transformation. The Industrial Revolution, for example, was variously seen in thousands of tutorials (depending on how deterministic you were willing to be) as the harbinger of a new ruling class in England, the basis of a new literary genre, the realist novel, and the cue for a modern political philosophy, Jeremy Bentham’s Utilitarianism.

Today, even for those of us who don’t subscribe to the seventies’ fondness for Marxisant history and its materialist axioms, it is not unreasonable to look back at the 60-year history of our republic and wonder if political freedom and economic change have altered the social nature of its citizenry. Or to put it another way, if colonial subjecthood left Indians exploited, undernourished and deferential, shouldn’t free, democratic citizenship and economic policies rooted in the interests of the Indian nation, have made a difference to its people and their habits? Fifty-nine, going on sixty, is not old in the life of a republic, but it is enough time for its citizens, collectively, to have acquired a bunch of habits, routines, opinions and anxieties, that can be treated as that country’s republican nature.

Has republican modernity changed us? For example, are we as hospitable as we used to be? Or have the demands of modernity made us more selfish, more centred on ourselves? Often the question is phrased in a way that suggests that hospitality is an Indian virtue. Every Indian who has been abroad has a horror story to tell about the absence of hospitality in the West. We congratulate ourselves on our concern for our parents, our willingness to care for them in old age. The truth of the matter is that a very large part of our vaunted hospitality and filialness is underwritten by cheap labour. It is harder to provide for unexpected guests or old parents in, say, New York, if you have to shop and carry and cook and clean up afterwards, all by yourself. What is often seen as a journey towards western individualism is, for the middle class Indian, often no more than the absence of servants.