Book Reviews – A Republic in the Making: India in the 1950s

I must have been no more than four years old. A hired Omni Van used to ferry all the neighbourhood kids to our preparatory school. One day, the driver of the Van relayed to my mother – either bemused or as a complaint- that every afternoon, on my way back from school, I would stick my neck out of the moving vehicle and shout at the top of my lungs, “Mandal, hai hai”. I of course have no recollection of this, nor do I remember if there was any consequence of this information relay. But growing up in 1990s,\ the reverberation of this slogan makes the subject matter of review seem so distant.