India After Gandhi, Ramachandra Guha

India After Gandhi : The History of the World’s Largest Democracy (2007)

An in-depth history of India's first steps into democracy. It manages to navigate the legacy of colonialism, geopolitical pressures, and internal cleavages, and highlights that India has long charted its own path in the world. That last point is the one most Western accounts of the multipolar order cannot accommodate.

Read it asking: How can we understand the evolution of India in a truly autonomous sense? Does this require an autarkic worldview?