Download or read book The Truths and Lies of Nationalism as Narrated by Charvak written by Partha Chatterjee and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2022-03-01 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written in the voice of the mythical atheist, naysayer, and general all-purpose heretic of Indian philosophy, The Truths and Lies of Nationalism as Narrated by Charvak presents a completely new way of telling the history of Indian nationalism. Severely criticizing the doctrines of both Hindu nationalism and pluralist secularism, it examines the ongoing debates over Indian civilization and recounts in detail how the present borders of India were defined by British colonial policy, the partition of 1947, and the integration of the princely states and the French and Portuguese territories. The emphasis is not so much on the state machinery inherited from colonial times but on the moral foundation of a new republic based on the solidarity of different but equal formations of the people. After a trenchant critique of the present-day conflicts over religion, caste, class, gender, language, and region in India, the book proposes a new politics of revitalized federalism. Intended for a general readership, and eschewing academic jargon, this book will be of interest to anyone concerned about the future of India.
Download or read book The Truths and Lies of Nationalism written by Partha Chatterjee and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Remembering Partition written by Gyanendra Pandey and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2001-11-22 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A compelling and harrowing examination of the violence that marked the Partition of India.
Download or read book Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World written by Partha Chatterjee and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 1993 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "If it isn't obvious from the title of this book that this is going to be full of postmodern jargon, it becomes clear quite quickly that Chaterjee prefers difficult terms like 'problematic', 'thematic' and 'discourse' without always defining them - he even admits his admiration for Rorty, Barthes, Foucault and Derrida. Nonetheless, underneath all of this verbiage is a strong and convincing argument about the three stages of nationalism in India: the moment of departure (epitomized by Bankimchandra Chatttopadhyay), the moment of manoeuvre (Gandhi) and the moment of arrival (Nehru). Chatterjee clearly shows how nationalism in India was akin to Gramsci's concept of the 'passive revolution' - i.e. merely a drive towards independence, not towards transforming or breaking up colonial instutions. He argues that, instead of supporting nationalism, we should instead challenge the marriage between reason and capital. From the title of this book one might expect Chatterjee to draw links to other anti-colonial nationalisms but he doesn't; rather he only discusses India (not even other parts of South Asia). While this approach doesn't really make this book too useful for examining anti-colonial nationalisms in general, for someone like me who has never read a book on Indian nationalism this is a good introduction." -- from Amazon.ca.
Download or read book Partition s Legacies written by Joya Chatterji and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2021-01-01 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Partition's Legacies offers a selection of Joya Chatterji's finest and most influential essays. "Partition, nation-making, frontiers, refugees, minority formation, and categories of citizenship have been my preoccupations," she writes in the preface, and these are also the major themes of this book. Chatterji's first book, Bengal Divided, shifted the focus from Muslim fanaticism as the driving force of Partition towards "secular" nationalism and Hindu aggression. Her Spoils of Partition rejected the idea of Partition as a breaking apart, showing it to be a process in the remaking of society and state. Her third book, Bengal Diaspora, cowritten with Claire Alexander and Annu Jalais, challenged the idea of migration and resettlement as exceptional situations. Partition's Legacies can be seen as continuous with Chatterji's earlier work as well as a distillation and expansion of it. Chatterji is known for the elegance of her prose as much as for the sharpness of her insights into Indian history, and Partition's Legacies will enthrall everyone interested in modern India's apocalyptic past. "What emerges from the essays," David Washbrook writes in the introduction, "is often quite startling. The demarcation of Partition followed no master plan or even coherent strategy but was made up of myriad ad hoc decisions taken on the ground, often by obscure actors. Refugee policy, immigrant rights, and even definitions of national citizenship ... were produced by no deus ex machina but out of day-to-day struggles on the streets and in the courts."
Download or read book Christianity and Politics in Tribal India written by G. Kanato Chophy and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2021-11-01 with total page 500 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through an ethnohistorical study of the Nagas—a congeries of tribes inhabiting the Indo-Myanmar frontier—this book explores an unusually interesting region of India that is all too often seen as peripheral. G. Kanato Chophy provides a distinct vantage point for understanding the Nagas in relation to colonialism, missionary encounters, identity politics, and cultural change, all seamlessly woven around American Baptist mission history in this region. The book also analyses India's cacophonous postindependence democracy in order to delineate multifaith issues, multiculturalism, and ethnicity-based political movements. Within the West, episodic memories of the "Great Awakening," a significant landmark in the history of Protestantism, have faded into archival records. But among the Nagas of the Indo-Myanmar highlands, Baptist Christianity persists as the dominant religion, influencing the daily lives of nearly three million people. Focusing variously on evangelical faith, missionary zeal, ethnic identities, political struggle, and complex culture wars, Christianity and Politics in Tribal India is an original and major study of how Protestant missions changed the history and destiny of a tribal community in one of the unlikeliest regions of South Asia.
Download or read book A Rule of Property for Bengal written by Ranajit Guha and published by Orient Blackswan. This book was released on 1982 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Religious the Spiritual and the Secular written by Robert Neil Minor and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 1999-01-01 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Religious, the Spiritual, and the Secular presents an account of Auroville, a city in contemporary southeast India, and the vision of founder and well-known guru Sri Aurobindo. Auroville's eventual takeover and the promotion of its goals by the Indian government leads to a thought-provoking discussion of the meaning of "secularism" in India.
Download or read book When Does History Begin written by Harjot Oberoi and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2022-01-01 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on important issues in Sikh religious identity and memory, Harjot Oberoi shows how premodern techniques of narrating the past and truth-telling in South Asia were deeply transformed by colonialism. Indian historiographical praxis has long been problematic. Al-Biruni, the eleventh-century polymath, was puzzled by how people in the subcontinent treated the protocols of history; it escaped his learning that Indian narrative constructions of the past were embedded in an intricate canon of poetical traditions and represented a radical departure from historical narratives in the Islamic, Sinic, and Greco-Roman worlds. Where others tended to search for "facts," people in South Asia looked for "affect." This alternative model for comprehending and evaluating the past—through aesthetics and gradients of taste—generated a crucially different variety of historical consciousness. Oberoi's examination of the Sikh tradition demonstrates what modern critical narrative achieves when it moves away from classical models, traversing significant moments in colonialism, coercion and protest in the Raj, the production of knowledge, the rise of secular nationalism, and modern notions of the self within and outside India.
Download or read book Hindutva and Violence written by Vinayak Chaturvedi and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2022-09-01 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hindutva and Violence explores the place of history in the political thought of Vinayak Damodar Savarkar (1883–1966), the most controversial Indian political thinker of the twentieth century and a key architect of Hindu nationalism. Examining his central claim that "Hindutva is not a word but a history," the book argues that, for Savarkar, this history was not a total history, a complete history, or a narrative history. Rather, its purpose was to trace key historical events to a powerful source—the font of motivation for "chief actors" of the past who had turned to violence in a permanent war for Hindutva as the founding principle of a Hindu nation. At the center of Savarkar's writings are historical characters who not only participated in ethical warfare against invaders, imperialists, and conquerors in India, but also became Hindus in acts of violence. He argues that the discipline of history provides the only method for interpreting Hindutva. The book also shows how Savarkar developed his conceptualization of history as a way into the meaning of Hindutva. Savarkar wrote extensively, from analyses of the nineteenth century to studies of antiquity, to draw up his histories of Hindus. He also turned to a wide range of works, from the epic tradition to contemporary social theory and world history, as his way of explicating "Hindutva" and "history." By examining Savarkar's key writings on history, historical methodology, and historiography, Vinayak Chaturvedi provides an interpretation of the philosophical underpinnings of Hindutva. Savarkar's interpretation of Hindutva, he demonstrates, requires above all grappling with his idea of history.
Download or read book Rabindranath Tagore s Ideational Challenges written by Bidyut Chakrabarty and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2022-12-30 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rabindranath Tagore's Ideational Challenges is an analytical attempt to show that Rabindranath Tagore in his own unique style raised some troublesome sociocultural issues that constrained the attainment of the politico-ideological objectives that the nationalists espoused. His creative texts were not merely literary articulation of the issues but were powerful responses to the prevalent conceptual parameters on which humanity rested. Although the poet did not appear to have made such a claim, his writings dealt with politico-ideologically innovative ideas about human diversity that naturally flourished in the Indian subcontinent. By approaching the pertinent sociocultural and politico-ideological issues from a literary perspective, the poet seemingly refashioned the dominant views on humanity. The selected novels and short stories in this book represent a distinct voice explicit in the politico-ideological message. Keeping this in view, each chapter is an articulation of the views that Rabindranath championed while contributing to ushering in a new vision based on his perception of well-entrenched sociocultural values of the time.
Download or read book Theatre activism subjectivity written by Bishnupriya Dutt and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2024-07-09 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through the lens of performance and politics, this collection zooms in on the context-specific dimensions, analogies, and micro-histories of the Left to better understand the larger picture. It proposes a search for the Left not from totalising Leftist ideological positions and partisan politics but from ethical dimensions through smaller-scale Left-leaning struggles; not from the political to the aesthetic, but from the potentiality of art to offer new political imagination and critique; not from the individual subordinated to the collective, but from the dialectics of subjectivity and collectivity. This is not an attempt at a sweeping global overview of Leftist cultures either, but a collection that brings together culture-specific and comparative perspectives. This book searches for fragments of and on the Left, past and present, through which to rethink and patch a fragmented world.
Download or read book Ploughshares and Swords written by Jayita Sarkar and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2022-07-15 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: India's nuclear program is often misunderstood as an inward-looking endeavor of secretive technocrats. In Ploughshares and Swords, Jayita Sarkar challenges this received wisdom, narrating a global story of India's nuclear program during its first forty years. The book foregrounds the program's civilian and military features by probing its close relationship with the space program. Through nuclear and space technologies, India's leaders served the technopolitical aims of economic modernity and the geopolitical goals of deterring adversaries. The politically savvy, transnationally connected scientists and engineers who steered the program obtained technologies, materials, and information through a variety of state and nonstate actors from Europe and North America, including both superpowers. They thus maneuvered around Cold War politics and the choke points of the nonproliferation regime. Hyperdiversification increased choices for the leaders of the nuclear program but reduced democratic accountability at home. The nuclear program became a consensus-enforcing device in the name of the nation. Ploughshares and Swords is a provocative new history with global implications. It shows how geopolitical and technopolitical visions influence decisions about the nation after decolonization. Thanks to generous funding from the Swiss National Science Foundation, the ebook editions of this book are available as Open Access volumes from Cornell Open (cornellpress.cornell.edu/cornell-open) and other repositories.
Download or read book Spheres of Injustice written by Albeena Shakil and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-05-23 with total page 133 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents a comprehensive overview of modern conceptualizations of justice in India. It analyses how these concepts relate to traditional theories of justice – in Marx, Ambedkar, Gandhi and Rawls as well as social realities in India. The book critically analyses theories of justice in India from a theoretical and comparative framework. It brings together contributions by well-known scholars to explore a range of questions and dilemmas around justice which have been brought about by a widening disparity between the powerful and the marginalized. The volume engages with the inadequacies of tautological theories of justice and fairness which fall short of adequately articulating the institutionalized forms of injustices and inequality facing citizens in modern society. It also explores exceptions and deviations from transcendental and universalist assumptions of contemporary theories of justice and studies movements and expressions of dissent and alternative structures and paradigms of conceptualizing justice. This book will be useful for scholars and researchers of political theory, political sociology, political studies, sociology, social theory, post-colonial theory and exclusion studies.
Download or read book Myths and Places written by Shonaleeka Kaul and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-06-23 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume explores the dialogic relationship between myths and places in the historically, geographically, and culturally diverse context of India. Given its ambiguous relationship with ‘facts’ and empirical reality, myth has suffered an uncertain status in the field of professional history, with the latter’s preference for scientifism over more creative orders of representation. Myths and Places rehabilitates myth, not as history’s primeval ‘Other’, nor as an instrument of socio-religious propagation, but as communitarian mechanisms by which societies made sense of themselves and their world. It argues that myths helped communities fashion their identities and their habitat/habitus, and were fashioned by these in turn. This book explores diverse forms of territorial becoming and belonging in a grassroots approach from across India, studying them in culturally sensitive ways to recover local life-worlds and their self-understanding. Further, challenging the stereotypical bracketing of the mythical with the sacred and the material with the historical, the multidisciplinary essays in the book examine myth in relation to not only religion but other historical phenomena such as ecology, ethnicity, urbanism, mercantilism, migration, politics, tourism, art, philosophy, performance, and the everyday. This book will be of interest to scholars and general readers of Indian history, regional studies, cultural geography, mythology, religious studies, and anthropology.
Download or read book The Making of Early Kashmir written by Muhammad Ashraf Wani and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-02-22 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first full-length history of early Kashmir locating it beyond its regional context, from pre-history to the thirteenth century. Drawing on a variety of sources—including conventional archaeological and literary sources, as well as non-conventional sources like philology, toponym and surnames—it presents a connected history of early Kashmir over the longue duree. It challenges tendencies towards nationalist historiographies of the region by situating it in the context of the shared histories of humanity. The volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of history, archaeology, anthropology and South Asian studies.
Download or read book I Am the People written by Partha Chatterjee and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2019-12-17 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The forms of liberal government that emerged after World War II are in the midst of a profound crisis. In I Am the People, Partha Chatterjee reconsiders the concept of popular sovereignty in order to explain today’s dramatic outburst of movements claiming to speak for “the people.” To uncover the roots of populism, Chatterjee traces the twentieth-century trajectory of the welfare state and neoliberal reforms. Mobilizing ideals of popular sovereignty and the emotional appeal of nationalism, anticolonial movements ushered in a world of nation-states while liberal democracies in Europe guaranteed social rights to their citizens. But as neoliberal techniques shrank the scope of government, politics gave way to technical administration by experts. Once the state could no longer claim an emotional bond with the people, the ruling bloc lost the consent of the governed. To fill the void, a proliferation of populist leaders have mobilized disaffected groups into a battle that they define as the authentic people against entrenched oligarchy. Once politics enters a spiral of competitive populism, Chatterjee cautions, there is no easy return to pristine liberalism. Only a counter-hegemonic social force that challenges global capital and facilitates the equal participation of all peoples in democratic governance can achieve significant transformation. Drawing on thinkers such as Antonio Gramsci, Michel Foucault, and Ernesto Laclau and with a particular focus on the history of populism in India, I Am the People is a sweeping, theoretically rich account of the origins of today’s tempests.
