Download or read book Who Is Bharat Mata On History Culture and the Idea of India written by Purushottam Agrawal and published by . This book was released on 2019-06-10 with total page 538 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An unprecedented and timely collection of writings by and on Jawaharlal Nehru--the man who shaped newly independent India; and the icon whose legacy is the subject of intense and often angry debate today. 'Who is this Bharat Mata, whose victory you wish?' asked Jawaharlal Nehru--a leading light of the Indian freedom movement who would become the country's first prime minister--at a public gathering in 1936. And then he explained: the mountains and rivers, forests and fields were of course dear to everyone, but what counted ultimately were 'the people of India...spread out all over this vast land. Bharat Mata, Mother India, [is] essentially these millions of people, and victory to her [is] victory to these people.' This collection of writings and speeches by and on Nehru shows us the mind--the ideology, born of experience, observation and deep study--behind this democratic and inclusive idea of India. It is a book of particular relevance at a time when 'nationalism' and the slogan 'Bharat Mata ki Jai' are being used to construct a militant and purely emotional idea of India that excludes millions of residents and citizens. 'Who Is Bharat Mata?' contains selections from Nehru's classic books--An Autobiography, Glimpses of World History and The Discovery of India; his speeches, essays and letters from the pre- and post-Independence years; and some of his most revealing interviews. The concluding section of the book comprises reminiscences and assessments of Nehru by his contemporaries--among them, Mahatma Gandhi, Bhagat Singh, Sardar Patel, Maulana Azad, Aruna Asaf Ali, Sheikh Abdullah, Ramdhari Singh Dinkar, Ali Sardar Jafri, Martin Luther King Jr and Atal Bihar Vajpayee. In this carefully put-together anthology--which also carries an illuminating introduction--Nehru emerges as a remarkable man of ideas and action who had an instinctive understanding of India's civilizational spirit, as also a clear commitment to the scientific temper; and as a leader who, despite the compulsions of politics, remained a true democrat. His legacy continues to be extremely relevant--for, in the words of the editor, an understanding of 'Nehru's political and intellectual journey is a pre-condition for India's survival as a democratic polity and as a humane, compassionate society'.
Download or read book The Goddess and the Nation written by Sumathi Ramaswamy and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2010-04-09 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Making the case for a new kind of visual history, The Goddess and the Nation charts the pictorial life and career of Bharat Mata, “Mother India,” the Indian nation imagined as mother/goddess, embodiment of national territory, and unifying symbol for the country’s diverse communities. Soon after Mother India’s emergence in the late nineteenth century, artists, both famous and amateur, began to picture her in various media, incorporating the map of India into her visual persona. The images they produced enabled patriotic men and women in a heterogeneous population to collectively visualize India, affectively identify with it, and even become willing to surrender their lives for it. Filled with illustrations, including 100 in color, The Goddess and the Nation draws on visual studies, gender studies, and the history of cartography to offer a rigorous analysis of Mother India’s appearance in painting, print, poster art, and pictures from the late nineteenth century to the present. By exploring the mutual entanglement of the scientifically mapped image of India and a (Hindu) mother/goddess, Sumathi Ramaswamy reveals Mother India as a figure who relies on the British colonial mapped image of her dominion to distinguish her from the other goddesses of India, and to guarantee her novel status as embodiment, sign, and symbol of national territory. Providing an exemplary critique of ideologies of gender and the science of cartography, Ramaswamy demonstrates that images do not merely reflect history; they actively make it. In The Goddess and the Nation, she teaches us about pictorial ways of learning the form of the nation, of how to live with it—and ultimately to die for it.
Download or read book Awakening Bharat Mata written by Swapan Dasgupta and published by Penguin Random House India Private Limited. This book was released on 2019-05-25 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was much more than an ordinary electoral phenomenon: it brought to the fore two contrasting views of nationhood: between those who saw modern India in terms of secular republicanism and on the other hand were those who sought to blend technological modernity with the country's Hindu inheritance. The Right's ascendancy and the debates that accompanied it, anticipated many of the concerns that find reflection today in the United States and Europe. The phenomenon of Hindu nationalism was also a profound intellectual challenge to the loose Left-liberal consensus that had prevailed in India since Jawaharlal Nehru became Prime Minister in 1947. The idea of Hindutva and the political character of the BJP have been closely scrutinised by scholars, and the impulse has been to view India's Right-wing politics as either a variant of fascism or merely a collection of sectarian prejudices. In fact, the inspiration for the Right in India has come from multiple and often contradictory sources, including the influence of individuals such as Sarvarkar, Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, Swami Vivekananda and Sri Aurobindo, not to mention the Arya Samaj movement. This collection is an attempt to showcase the phenomenon of Hindu nationalism in terms of how it perceives itself. Many of the concerns that drive the Indian Right are located in the country's nationalist culture. In trying to locate some of the ideas, attitudes and beliefs that define the Indian Right, Awakening Bharat Mata also seeks to identify the nature of Indian conservatism and identify its similarities and differences with political thought in the West. This book is not about Hindu nationalism in power but as a social and political movement and its aim is to encourage a more informed understanding of an idea that will remain relevant in Indian life far beyond victories and defeats in elections.
Download or read book The Idea of India written by Sunil Khilnani and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 1999-06-04 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In his new introduction, Khilnani addresses these issues in the new perspectives afforded by events of the recent year in India and in the world."--BOOK JACKET.
Download or read book The Mortal God written by Milinda Banerjee and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-04-19 with total page 455 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work explores how colonial India imagined human and divine figures to battle the nature and locus of sovereignty.
Download or read book Producing India written by Manu Goswami and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-01-26 with total page 415 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When did categories such as a national space and economy acquire self-evident meaning and a global reach? Why do nationalist movements demand a territorial fix between a particular space, economy, culture, and people? Producing India mounts a formidable challenge to the entrenched practice of methodological nationalism that has accorded an exaggerated privilege to the nation-state as a dominant unit of historical and political analysis. Manu Goswami locates the origins and contradictions of Indian nationalism in the convergence of the lived experience of colonial space, the expansive logic of capital, and interstate dynamics. Building on and critically extending subaltern and postcolonial perspectives, her study shows how nineteenth-century conceptions of India as a bounded national space and economy bequeathed an enduring tension between a universalistic political economy of nationhood and a nativist project that continues to haunt the present moment. Elegantly conceived and judiciously argued, Producing India will be invaluable to students of history, political economy, geography, and Asian studies.
Download or read book Cultural Constellations Place Making and Ethnicity in Eastern India c 1850 1927 written by Swarupa Gupta and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2017-11-01 with total page 422 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Swarupa Gupta outlines a paradigm for moving beyond ethnic fragmentation by showing how people made places to forge an interregional arena. The analysis includes interpretive strategies to mediate contemporary separatisms.
Download or read book Incarnations written by Sunil Khilnani and published by Random House India. This book was released on 2017-01-12 with total page 544 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For all of India’s myths, stories and moral epics, Indian history remains a curiously unpeopled place. In Incarnations, Sunil Khilnani fills that space, recapturing the human dimension of how the world’s largest democracy came to be. His trenchant portraits of emperors, warriors, philosophers, film stars and corporate titans—some famous, some unjustly forgotten—bring feeling, wry humour and uncommon insight to dilemmas that extend from ancient times to our own.
Download or read book Liberalised India Politicised Middle Class and Software Professionals written by Anshu Srivastava and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2021-09-05 with total page 120 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume explores the emergence, evolution and definition of the middle class in India. As a class created as the interpreters between the colonial rulers and the millions whom they governed in the pre-Independence era, the Indian middle class has existed in congruence with the state, occupying vital positions in state administration. Since Independence, this middle class underwent major sociological change as they live independent of the state, which affected their social, economic and political position, reaping benefits of liberalisation and globalisation through education and employment. An otherwise internally differentiated and heterogeneous group, the new Indian middle class often unifies itself to shape socio-political discourse that affects politics and policymaking, from domestic to international affairs. This volume analyses this class phenomenon through a close study of a new metropolitan middle class in India – the software professionals, emblematic of the 'new India’. It discusses this emerging class as a political category and their engagements with the state, democracy, political parties, issues of gender, basic necessities and social justice. Further, it discusses their social action and ‘middle class activism’ for issues such as environment, cleanliness and corruption, particularly highlighting its presence in the private sector and electronic media. A fresh perspective on India’s political milieu, this volume will be of interest to scholars and researchers of sociology, modern Indian history, political science, economics and South Asia studies.
Download or read book Art and Nationalism in Colonial India 1850 1922 written by Partha Mitter and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 538 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Partha Mitter's book is a pioneering study of the history of modern art on the Indian subcontinent from 1850 to 1922. The author tells the story of Indian art during the Raj, set against the interplay of colonialism and nationalism. The work addresses the tensions and contradictions that attended the advent of European naturalism in India, as part of the imperial design for the westernisation of the elite, and traces the artistic evolution from unquestioning westernisation to the construction of Hindu national identity. Through a wide range of literary and pictorial sources, Art and Nationalism in Colonial India balances the study of colonial cultural institutions and networks with the ideologies of the nationalist and intellectual movements which followed. The result is a book of immense significance, both in the context of South Asian history and in the wider context of art history.
Download or read book The Discovery of India written by Jawaharlal Nehru and published by . This book was released on 1960 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When J. Nehru was a prisoner in Ahmadnager Fort prison, he wrote this history of India.
Download or read book Ananda Math written by Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay and published by Diamond Pocket Books Pvt Ltd. This book was released on 1998 with total page 120 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the most popular Indian novels of all ages, 'Ananda Math' was translated innumerable times into Indian and English languages. Five editions were published in Bengali and Hindi during the author's lifetime, the first in 1882. The novel has the backdrop of the 18th century famine in Bengal, infamous as "Chhiyattorer Manvantar" (famine of 76th Bengali year, 1276), to narrate the saga of armed uprising of the ascetics and their disciples against the pillaging East India Company rulers. The uprising is historically known as 'Santan Vidroha', the ascetics being the children of Goddess Jagadambe. The saga of 'Ananda Math' is thrilling and best epitomised in the patriotic mass-puller song "Bande Mataram' ('Hail thee, O My Motherland'). The song is still a mantra that stirs imagination of millions of Hindus. The ascetics robbed the tormentors of people — the British rulers and the greedy jamindars — distributed the looted wealth to poverty-stricken people but kept nothing for themselves. Their targets were mostly the Company armoury and supplies. They had a highly organised setup, spread throughout Bengal. It was also India's first battle for freedom, and not the Sipahi Vidroha of 1857.
Download or read book The Nation As Mother written by SUGATA. BOSE and published by Penguin Enterprise. This book was released on 2022-04-15 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: AN ESSENTIAL VOLUME TO UNDERSTAND INDIA'S NATIONAL AND CULTURAL LEGACY In The Nation as Mother, an interconnected set of deeply researched and powerfully argued essays and speeches Sugata Bose explores the relationship between nation, reason and religion in Indian political thought and practice. Offering a subtle interpretation of the ways of imagining the nation as mother, the book illuminates different visions of India as a free and flexible federal union that have acquired renewed salience today. Breaking out of the false dichotomy between secular nationalism and religious communalism, the author provides incisive analyses of the political legacies of Tagore and Gandhi, Nehru and Bose, Aurobindo and Jinnah, and a range of other thinkers and leaders of the anti-colonial movement. The essays question assumptions about any necessary contradiction between cosmopolitanism and patriotism and the tendency among religious majoritarians and secularists alike to confuse uniformity with unity. The speeches in Parliament draw on a rich historical repertoire to offer valuable lessons in political ethics. In arguing against the dangers of an intolerant religious majoritarianism, this book makes a case for concepts of layered and shared sovereignty that might enable an overarching sense of Indian nationhood to coexist with multiple identities of the country's diverse populace. The Nation as Mother delves into history to evoke an alternative future of a new India based on cultural intimacy among its different communities.
Download or read book The Great Indian Manthan written by Gurdeep Sappal and published by Penguin Random House India Private Limited. This book was released on 2023-11-30 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: India is rapidly becoming the world’s largest flailing democracy. India’s institutional framework has been systematically undermined, from within and without. In the tenth volume of the Rethinking India series, some of India’s most eminent persons write of how we can think of re-engineering India’s hardware (redressing structural flaws in India’s existing institutions, creating new institutions equipped to address fresh challenges and re-engaging all of India’s systems), as well as ensuring progressive forces radically re-invent their political strategies and operational methodologies to socialize Indians to constitutional values.
Download or read book India written by Diana L Eck and published by Harmony. This book was released on 2012-03-27 with total page 578 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In India: A Sacred Geography, renowned Harvard scholar Diana Eck offers an extraordinary spiritual journey through the pilgrimage places of the world's most religiously vibrant culture and reveals that it is, in fact, through these sacred pilgrimages that India’s very sense of nation has emerged. No matter where one goes in India, one will find a landscape in which mountains, rivers, forests, and villages are elaborately linked to the stories of the gods and heroes of Indian culture. Every place in this vast landscape has its story, and conversely, every story of Hindu myth and legend has its place. Likewise, these places are inextricably tied to one another—not simply in the past, but in the present—through the local, regional, and transregional practices of pilgrimage. India: A Sacred Geography tells the story of the pilgrim’s India. In these pages, Diana Eck takes the reader on an extraordinary spiritual journey through the living landscape of this fascinating country –its mountains, rivers, and seacoasts, its ancient and powerful temples and shrines. Seeking to fully understand the sacred places of pilgrimage from the ground up, with their stories, connections and layers of meaning, she acutely examines Hindu religious ideas and narratives and shows how they have been deeply inscribed in the land itself. Ultimately, Eck shows us that from these networks of pilgrimage places, India’s very sense of region and nation has emerged. This is the astonishing and fascinating picture of a land linked for centuries not by the power of kings and governments, but by the footsteps of pilgrims. India: A Sacred Geography offers a unique perspective on India, both as a complex religious culture and as a nation. Based on her extensive knowledge and her many decades of wide-ranging travel and research, Eck's piercing insights and a sweeping grasp of history ensure that this work will be in demand for many years to come.
Download or read book India After Gandhi The History of the World s Largest Democracy written by Ramachandra Guha and published by Pan Macmillan. This book was released on 2017-07-13 with total page 100 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ramachandra Guha’s India after Gandhi is a magisterial account of the pains, struggles, humiliations and glories of the world’s largest and least likely democracy. A riveting chronicle of the often brutal conflicts that have rocked a giant nation, and of the extraordinary individuals and institutions who held it together, it established itself as a classic when it was first published in 2007. In the last decade, India has witnessed, among other things, two general elections; the fall of the Congress and the rise of Narendra Modi; a major anti-corruption movement; more violence against women, Dalits, and religious minorities; a wave of prosperity for some but the persistence of poverty for others; comparative peace in Nagaland but greater discontent in Kashmir than ever before. This tenth anniversary edition, updated and expanded, brings the narrative up to the present. Published to coincide with seventy years of the country’s independence, this definitive history of modern India is the work of one of the world’s finest scholars at the height of his powers.
Download or read book Nehru written by Shashi Tharoor and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2011-10-17 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shashi Tharoor delivers an incisive biography of the great secularist who—alongside his spiritual father, Mahatma Gandhi—led the movement for India’s independence from British rule and ushered his newly independent country into the modern world. The man who would one day help topple British rule and become India’s first prime minister started out as a surprisingly unremarkable student. Born into a wealthy, politically influential Indian family in the waning years of the Raj, Jawaharlal Nehru was raised on Western secularism and the humanist ideas of the Enlightenment. Once he met Gandhi in 1916, Nehru threw himself into the nonviolent struggle for India’s independence, a struggle that wasn’t won until 1947. India had found a perfect political complement to her more spiritual advocate, but neither Nehru nor Gandhi could prevent the horrific price for independence: partition. This fascinating biography casts an unflinching eye on Nehru’s heroic efforts for, and stewardship of, independent India and gives us a careful appraisal of his legacy to the world.
