“…Much of the existing literature, some of them with compellingly novel insights, carry inadequate strength to understand specific cultural locations and historical situations, and may have a Eurocentric bias of looking at everything associated with power as masculine (state, development, religion, sports, etc.). Of late, there has been a surge in the quasi- psychoanalytic study of political leaders in India (Jaffrelot, 2015; Kanjilal, 2018; Kaur, 2015, 2017; Kinnvall, 2019) and this engagement has most notably been directed at Modi, partly due to his current rule and partly due to the academic obsession to decode him, an impulse that can only be matched by the lure of Nehru as a modernizer and developmental icon (Khilnani, 2004; Krishnamurti, 2014; Prakash, 1999). This body of work is predominantly character analyses and not surprisingly, it seeks to bring in the question of masculinity to converse with development and nationalism.…”