" We must create a history of India in living terms. Up to the present, that history, as written by the English, practically begins with Warren Hastings, and crams in certain unavoidable preliminaries, which cover a few thousand years…The history of India has yet to be written for the first time. It has to be humanized, emotionalized, made the trumpet-voice and evangel of the race that inhabit India. " Sister Nivedita. This article is a beginning to this dream of Sister Nivedita.
Download Free PDF View PDF
This is the second of a three-volume history of India, characterized by three main arguments: (a) Indian history has been crucially conditioned by the manifold and two-way connections linking the Indian subcontinent to the remainder of the world; (b) Indian society was never static, but always crisscrossed by powerful currents of change; (c) colonialism caused both the crystallization of a ‘traditional’ society – which, in that shape, had never really existed before – and, at the same time, the rise of modernity. This volume examines the history of India from the collapse of the Mughal Empire to the end of colonialism in 1947. It analyses the features of the most important pre-colonial Indian states and the role played by the British colonialism in their destruction or reduction to political irrelevance. Second, the volume highlights the contradictory role of the colonial order in freezing a previously evolving society, causing the coming into being of a ‘traditional India’ and, at the same time, somewhat unwittingly, triggering the rise of a new modern India. Furthermore, the volume analyses the role of India in supporting the British Empire both economically and militarily, and how the implementation of the liberal economic policy by the colonial rulers resulted in the loss of millions of Indian lives. Finally, the volume closely examines the rise and evolution of Indian nationalism, the reasons that forced for the British to end their rule, and, last but not least, the causes of partition and the responsibilities of the parties and political leaders involved.
Download Free PDF View PDF
Download Free PDF View PDF
Download Free PDF View PDF
Download Free PDF View PDF
Download Free PDF View PDF
Download Free PDF View PDF
The significance of political revolutionaries in the history of Indian anti-colonialism is indisputable and yet it is difficult to describe a singular 'Indian revolutionary tradition'. During this course, which will survey the half-century before independence in 1947, we will explore a variety of radical or revolutionary politics, searching as much for intellectual disjuncture as commonalities. We will focus on reading personal narratives that demonstrate the ways in which key figures thought and wrote about their journeys towards a political identity – reading, for instance, M. K. Gandhi's revolt against history and liberalism, Hind Swaraj; Lala Har Dayal's memoirs of his world-crossing revolutionary circuits; and the young revolutionary self that emerges from Bhagat Singh's Jail Notebook. We will pay attention throughout to themes of violence, travel, and the often-times ambivalent relationship between revolutionaries and the nation. We will complement our focus on texts with reflection on the importance of images of the revolutionary and the nature of popular memory in the Indian context.
Download Free PDF View PDF
Journal of Asian Studies
