In early 1947, as the time of India’s Independence drew near, a news editorial rather plaintively asked: ”What does it mean to call ourselves Indians?” It was a pertinent question, for what really unified the 345 million people in India? We were a land of a million gods, three thousand tongues, and a patchwork of over 500 princely states, some as large as Britain itself.

In its early years, the idea of India was indeed an uncertain one — an identity tenuously held together by the afterglow of freedom. But soon demands for independence began to arise from the north, the east and the south, and India became a country both “psychologically prepared for and fearful of civil war”.

In those early, fragile years, it may have been far too easy to conclude that the country was impossible to govern democratically, and that there were just too many conflicting allegiances to region, religion, caste and community.

India, unlike China, is not what Plato called a “philosopher kingdom”, where an elite determines the state of the nation. An idea can survive in this country only if it gains broad acceptance and understanding. In India, a national consciousness gradually emerged out of the efforts of Independence-era leaders to build a common identity — giving people the universal right to vote and a secular government. For Nehru, national sentiment also meant a planned economy. What, after all, he noted, could unify a people better, following a century of imperialism, than a nurturing state. For Tagore, it was the music of a national anthem that provided Indian citizens “with a single character of the mind and habit of the heart”.