In his celebrated book The Idea of India, published on the occasion of India’s 50^th year of independence, Sunil Khilnani opened the floodgates for a resurgence of thinking about India’s complex and layered strands of intellectual history. The last 25 years has seen a rich proliferation of literature in the field that has redefined the place of historical figures (both well-known and little-known) and Indian thought in the broader network of global ideas, signaling the intricate ways in which Indian thought emerged and intersected with the rest of the world. This literature has also rethought the implications of colonialism, nationalism, economy, and ecology, among others, in Indian history. Equally, there has also been a concerted effort to recover and write histories of minorities (defined variously in terms of religion, identity, region or politics) in this larger story of modern India. In this panel, we seek to add to this latter impetus by highlighting four distinctive and somewhat overlooked ways in which the idea and stories of minorities played a pivotal role in the making of modern India. Shaunna Rodrigues focuses on the importance of fraternity that minority leaders like B R Ambedkar and Abul Kalam Azad advanced in the service of democratizing India; Sarath Pillai recovers a tradition of Muslim federal thought and centers it in the history of Indian federalism and constitutionalism; Vanya Vaidehi Bhargav uncovers the role that the idea of a Hindu minority played in the emergent discourse of secularism, and Arvind Elangovan explores the process by which the making of the Indian constitution was simultaneously driven by and built on ideas of minority inclusion and exclusion.

Together, by focusing on the interrelated ideas of democracy, federalism, secularism, and constitutionalism we highlight the pivotal role that minority thought played in the making of modern India both in the realm of political ideas and in the creation of political institutions in the aftermath of decolonization in the mid-20th century. In doing so, we make a discernible departure from conventional historiography that has always sought to juxtapose a pre-conceived and a readily given ‘minority’ with a master narrative that privileged the thought and contributions of well-known historical figures and historical processes. Instead, we suggest that these so-called minority voices played a decisive role in the very way in which modern India’s landscape of ideas and institutions emerged. Such a reframing is important, for historically, a defining question for the making of modern India was the so-called ‘Indian problem’ that viewed the inability of different groups and communities to co-exist in a singular political and constitutional framework. In rejecting this characterization, the panel will underscore that the edifice of an idea of India rests on pillars of minority histories. We anticipate this panel to be of great interest to scholars of South Asia and the British Empire and anyone engaged in the global history of minorities and understanding their role in the shaping of the modern nation-state/s in an era of decolonization in the 20th century.