At the end of my research on the 1946–47 interim government published as India in the Interregnum (2019), I had hoped to produce a second instalment, on its 1947–51 successor, given its relative neglect in published accounts and presence in primary sources, especially the now-accessible post-1947 Jawaharlal Nehru papers. The last years of the 1940s and the first of the 1950s constitute an intermediate period between Partition/Freedom (1947) and Republic/Democracy (1950–52) that is often seen through either or both of these lenses. This was captured in a critical review of India in the Interregnum that considered ‘this continuity … to be the root cause of the ills that plague the post-colonial nation.…’

Approaching its eighth decade, as independent India experiences its eighteenth government, this book seeks to remember its first predecessor, which functioned in a uniquely intermediate period. It is important to do so because, whether in public recall or in academic research, the first Nehru government has had a somewhat shadowy existence, which is compensated by the axiom that it stood for a transitional phase for the country. But, as the late D. L. Sheth wrote, ‘historicization makes historical sense, only when made in terms of contemporary sensibilities….’ This intervention then surveys the 1947–51 government, liminally located between dominion and democracy, and subsumed between Partition and nation-building, in an ‘academic no-man's land’. It attempts an exercise of historical recovery crystallised from the post-1947 prime ministerial papers in the hope that this reconstruction might help in reading post-Partition Indian party politics. The standard conception of that multi-party government is that it is clustered around a duumvirate, but this book tries to bring forth and intertwine its multiple individual traits, identity tensions and institutional trends.

This triangular pyramid was held together by provincial or princely politics, progressive or prejudicial passions and party pronouncements. The all-India whole that was forged in those first years, before being put to a popular test, was pivotal to subsequent state-building, and this book probes the performance of that pre-1952 government, whose political heritage continues to be dissected. As it has been said, ‘nations themselves are narrations …’, so a history of the first independent Indian government is one way to contextualise the contemporary by answering the ‘need for links and connections’.6