We’ve always seen the west as the crucible of political ideas, but in this global century I think India offers the most insightful space to examine where planetary and global life is going,” says Shruti Kapila, Professor of History and Politics.

“What it shows may not always be positive, but it allows us to see the scale of the challenge.” W“ India, Kapila says, is paradigmatic for understanding both modernity and the nature of the nation state.

“India was the first country to be decolonised, from the British Empire, since America,” she points out. “But India didn’t go down the communist or dictatorship route.

Nor did it follow a liberalism that was supposedly ‘bequeathed’ by the British Empire. Instead, Indians produced an entirely new vocabulary around questions of the state, of violence, and of religion – and that is fascinating and hugely important.”

Kapila was brought up in Chandigarh, a post-Independence planned city in north-west India. “Chandigarh was commissioned by India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru (Trinity 1907), as a vision of what peace could look like after years of bloodshed,” she says.

“My parents moved there as part of that dream and part of the work of nation building. “India had always historically bucked the European trend, which is to say that it did not form its nationality on the basis of a single language or a single religion.

And that first generation of modern nation builders was very clear that India was going to instruct the world in this kind of unity in diversity.”

The national stories of this new India, she says, are not simply the outcome of European histories.

“They were produced by major political struggle over more than a century. The Indian National Congress (INC) party [founded in 1885] was the first explicitly anticolonialist political party in the world.”

It provided, says Kapila, significant inspiration for the global civil rights movements of the 1950s and 1960s. “Think of Mandela and Martin Luther King. The INC of Gandhi’s time created massive innovation both in mobilisation techniques, such as civil disobedience and in political language.

That had a domino effect across other Asian and African colonised nations. The result was a non-aligned movement that created a bloc of nations standing apart from the new ‘imperial’ divisions of a world run by the Americans and the Soviet Union.”

Kapila’s graduation from Panjab University in Chandigarh was followed in the late 1990s by a Master’s in History at India’s top-ranked Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi. “It seems like another time now,” she says.

“It was a moment when optimism around globalisation was very high. Knowledge should never have boundaries, but it was especially true at that time when I was coming up for graduate work.

There was an openness, a buzz of ideas. You felt like you were part of a major global moment, a celebration of human possibilities.” Kapila went first to London for a doctorate, then to Oxford, followed by Tufts in Massachusetts before arriving in Cambridge 15 years ago.