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Drafting the Indian Constitution
How a 299-member Constituent Assembly, guided by B. R. Ambedkar's Drafting Committee, spent almost three years producing the world's longest written constitution.
India's First General Election (1951-52)
Between October 1951 and February 1952, roughly 173 million Indians, most of them unable to read a ballot, took part in the largest election the world had yet seen.
Partition and Independence (1947)
At midnight on 15 August 1947, British rule ended and India became independent — alongside a partition whose human toll historians still cannot fully agree on.
The Green Revolution
How new high-yielding wheat varieties, adopted at speed in Punjab and Haryana from the mid-1960s, turned a food-importing India into a grain-surplus one — at a real ecological and regional cost.
The Integration of the Princely States
How Sardar Patel and V. P. Menon persuaded, and where necessary pressured, some 565 princely states into a single Indian union within about a year of independence.