Welcome to our book review site go-pdf.online!
You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
The State and Governance in India
This book presents an innovative investigation of the policies of the Indian Congress during the late colonial period. Departing from the existing historiography of Indian nationalism, it analyses the extent to which Congress elites engaged in processes intended to foster nation-building in India. Rejecting the long-standing premise that the Congress primarily sought to generate a national identity, the author hypothesizes that Congress elites knowingly grappled with the creation of a national governmentality. He argues that they distanced themselves from lethargic nation-building exercises and instead opted to support more practical and more feasible state-building efforts. Accordingly, this book shows that Congress elites constructed the institutions that would enable Indians to govern themselves after India’s liberation from British imperialism. It presents evidence which shows that Congress elites began to perceive themselves and their organization as an emerging post-colonial state.
Politics and Left Unity in India
The historical assessments of Left unity in 1930s India misrepresent activities designed to achieve unity. The common treatment of the relationship between Indian socialists and communists emphasizes disunity and the inability to find common ground. Scholarly discussions about unity in fact highlight its impracticality and the inevitability of its failure. This book proposes that during this moment, for socialists and communists, unity was not just an ideal, but was in fact considered to be a possible and very realizable goal. Rather than focusing exclusively on ideological fissures as the literature does, the book explores the possibilities for unity. The author investigates the United Fron...
Revolutionary Pasts
Raza traces the anti-colonial struggles of Indian revolutionaries in the context of Communist Internationalism during the last decades of the British Raj.
Gender and Radical Politics in India
The Naxalbari movement marks a significant moment in the postcolonial history of India. Beginning as an armed peasant uprising in 1967 under the leadership of radical communists, the movement was inspired by the Marxist-Leninist theory of revolution and involved a significant section of the contemporary youth from diverse social strata with a vision of people’s revolution. It inspired similar radical movements in other South Asian countries such as Nepal. Arguing that the history and memory of the Naxalbari movement is fraught with varied gendered experiences of political motivation, revolutionary activism, and violence, this book analyses the participation of women in the movement and the...
Gandhi's Spinning Wheel and the Making of India
Gandhi’s use of the spinning wheel was one of the most significant unifying elements of the nationalist movement in India. Spinning was seen as an economic and political activity that could bring together the diverse population of South Asia, and allow the formerly elite nationalist movement to connect to the broader Indian population. This book looks at the politics of spinning both as a visual symbol and as a symbolic practice. It traces the genealogy of spinning from its early colonial manifestations in Company painting to its appropriation by the anti-colonial movement. This complex of visual imagery and performative ritual had the potential to overcome labour, gender, and religious divisions and thereby produce an accessible and effective symbol for the Gandhian anti-colonial movement. By thoroughly examining all aspects of this symbol’s deployment, this book unpacks the politics of the spinning wheel and provides a model for the analysis of political symbols elsewhere. It also probes the successes of India’s particular anti-colonial movement, making an invaluable contribution to studies in social and cultural history, as well as South Asian Studies.
Acts of Aid
This socio-political history on the aftermath of the 1934 Bihar–Nepal earthquake explores disaster aid, relief, and reconstruction and the questions they give rise to about class, communities and inequality. The book traces disaster responses across the twentieth century in order to demonstrate how they were embedded in political processes transcending the event of the earthquake. Aid, relief and reconstruction mirrored political agendas and ideas that articulated both changes and continuities by the colonial state, civil society and international organisations. The impact of the earthquake and aid in its wake varied widely according to social groups, ethnicity and gender in the aftermath. By studying the effects of the earthquake on communities directly affected and society, the author argues that we can come closer to an understanding of the role political, social and cultural factors held in shaping resilience to natural disasters.
Gandhi's Spinning Wheel and the Making of India
Spinning was seen as both an economic and political activity that could bring together the diverse population of South Asia. This book looks at the politics of spinning both as a visual symbol and as a symbolic practice. It traces the genealogy of spinning from its early colonial manifestations in Company painting to its reinterpretation, deployment and manipulation by the anti-colonial movement.
Making Refugees in India
Offering a global history of India's refugee regime, Making Refugees in India explores how one of the first postcolonial states during the mid-twentieth century wave of decolonisation rewrote global practices surrounding refugees - signified by India's refusal to sign the 1951 UN Refugee Convention. In broadening the scope of this decision well beyond the Partition of India, starting with the so called 'Wilsonian moment' and extending to the 1970s, the refugee is placed within the postcolonial effort to address the inequalities of the subject-citizenship of the British empire through the fullest realisation of self-determination. India's 'strategically ambiguous' approach to refugees is thus...
The Popular Front and the Global Circulation of Marxism through Calcutta, 1920s-1970s
This book examines the global circulation of Marxism seen from one of its most highly charged sites: Calcutta in India. Building on but also revising existing approaches to global intellectual history, the book presents the circulation of Marxism through Calcutta as a historically-sited problem of mass mediation. Using tools from media studies, the book explores the way that Marxism was presented to the public, the technologies used, and the meanings of Marxism in twentieth-century Calcutta. Demonstrating how the Popular Front was split between the so-called 'people's group' and those whom were called 'intellectuals', the book argues that the people's group generally identified themselves as...
Hindu Mahasabha in Colonial North India, 1915-1930
Hindu nationalism has emerged as a political ideology represented by the Hindu Mahasabha. This book explores the campaign for Hindu unity and organisation in the context of the Hindu-Muslim conflict in colonial north India in the early twentieth century. It argues that India's partition in 1947 was a result of the campaign and politics of the Hindu rightwing rather than the Islamist politics of the Muslim League alone. The book explains that the Mahasabha articulated Hindu nationalist ideology as a means of constructing a distinct Hindu political identity and unity among the Hindus in conflict with the Muslims in the country. It looks at the Mahasabha’s ambivalence with the Indian National...
