This article examines the connected histories of armed tribal and peasant revolts in colonial and postcolonial India with reference to the ongoing Maoist conflict in rural and tribal areas of central and eastern India. The article makes two interrelated arguments about the violent continuities that endure from colonial to postcolonial contexts: (1) the nation-state system, in its efforts to establish control and influence, creates a hierarchy of citizenship engaging in the hostile policing of marginalised subjects, thereby engendering armed revolts and political violence; (2) the postcolonial state's response to these armed revolts by marginalised subjects who challenge its sovereignty and monopoly over violence, is equally violent and repressive. Most significantly, the state's response is legitimised in the same colonial idioms and justifications that mark epistemic and physical violence against the third world. When Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore wrote this poem in Bengali (translated into English as The Sunset of the Century) on 31 December 1899, India was headed towards the dawn of a new century when the colonial government would be replaced by sovereign rule with the establishment of the independent nation-state of India. For Tagore, nationalism was a social and ideational project not the culmination of a political and territorial ambition. His poem, thus, could be read as a response to the growing allurement with the idea of the modern nation-state among Indian nationalists who argued that the absence of a politically unifying nation-state was responsible for India's plight under colonial rule. Tagore warns of the 'self-love' of the nation-state that would engender its cannibalisation; a political existence that would destroy its soul.