The above-mentioned comment about the negotiated relationship between people and the states in which they live directly points to the importance of the interactions that ordinary citizens have with the state on an everyday basis. The chapters in From Subjects to Citizens accordingly engage with what is now a critical debate in the social sciences, namely the concept of the ‘everyday state’ and the various processes by which elite ideologies and institutions are interpreted, translated and manipulated at the quotidian level by men and women as they negotiate their lives. As their authors emphasize, the state in the context of newly independent South Asia did not operate as a uniform entity, but rather conducted its business in terms of specific networks of power and class structures that affected what it meant to different sets of interests.