The formation of the Indian state runs in a parallel narrative with the formation of its elite. Indian independence marked the powerful role of the elite in establishing an agenda of modernisation driven by an instrumentalist notion of the state. The elite were constituted in the emerging national space of an independent India as the drivers of social change processes, bringing Indian society into modernisation.

The elite comprised not only political power brokers and private interests, but also a middle class educated in English and employed in the private, state and civil society sectors. The emergent professional middle class, as a subject of the modern state, held considerable power, with its access to primarily English-language education and opportunities for employment in both the private and public sectors.

The state, on one hand, developed an extended bureaucracy for running the state apparatus and, on the other hand, gradually cultivated the market, creating employment opportunities for the middle classes and ensuring the participation of the middle classes in India's mixed economy. The participation of the middle classes in the Indian economy and in the cultivation of its imagination is a salient feature that plays out in the discursive arena. The success of the Indian state in this sense was intrinsically tied to the recrafting of an imagination of an independent India that, on one hand, put forth a narrative of the nation state and, on the other hand, mobilised the market as a site for participation.