Social and political thought in modern India emerged from the collision between indigenous traditions and colonial modernity. Spanning the 19th and 20th centuries, this intellectual tradition blends resistance to imperial rule with radical socio-religious reform, fundamentally reshaping the subcontinent’s political consciousness, civil rights frameworks, and national identity.

Social and political thought is linked with the interplay of factors involving society,
economy and politics. Political thought is a generalized term which comprises all
thoughts, theories and values of a person or a group of persons or a community on state
and questions related to the state. The purpose of this introduction is not merely to
document the political ideas of those thinkers who changed the course of India’s freedomstruggle, but also to analyse the socio-historical contexts in which these ideas evolved
and also the socio-political changes that these ideas aimed at. Since the book is about
modern Indian political thought, it’s obvious focus is on ideas that critically influenced
the articulation of nationalism in India. Even before nationalism emerged as a dominant
ideology, there was a long tradition of political thought which provided specific
perspectives in which several thinkers interpreted their views and ideas on different
aspects. Two major thinkers, Kautilya (Ancient) and Zia-ud-din-Barani (Medieval)
representing two different periods of Indian socio-political life put forward their views
most systematically and ideologically.