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The actions of the radical left in Punjab in pre-Independence India during the 1920s and 30s have often been viewed as foreign and quintessentially un-Indian due to their widely vilified opposition to the Quit India campaign. This book examines some of these deterministic misapprehensions and establishes that, in fact, Punjabi communism was inextricably woven in to the local culture and traditions of the region. By focusing on the political history of the organised left, a considerable and growing force in South Asia, it discusses the formation and activities of radical groups in colonial Punjab and offers valuable insights as to why some of these groups did not participate in the Congress movement during the run-up to independence. Furthermore, it traces the impact of the colonial state's institutions and policies upon these radical groups and sheds light on how and when the left, though committed to revolutionary action, found itself obliged to assimilate within the new framework devised by the colonial state. Based on a thorough investigation of primary sources in India and the UK with special emphasis upon the language used by the revolutionaries of this period, this book will be of great interest to academics in the field of political history, language and the political culture of colonialism, as well as those working on Empire and South Asian studies.
Raza traces the anti-colonial struggles of Indian revolutionaries in the context of Communist Internationalism during the last decades of the British Raj.
This book analyses the participation of women in the Naxalbari movement and their experiences. It makes a significant contribution to the understanding of radical communist politics in South Asia, particularly in relation to issues concerning the role of women in radical politics.
A provocative examination of how the British colonial experience in India was shaped by chronic unease, anxiety, and insecurity.
This book examines how, over colonial times, the diverse practices and customs of an existing rural universe—with its many forms of livelihood—were reshaped to create a new agrarian world of settled farming. While focusing on Punjab, India, this pathbreaking analysis offers a broad argument about the workings of colonial power: the fantasy of imperialism, it says, is to make the universe afresh. Such radical change, Neeladri Bhattacharya shows, is as much conceptual as material. Agrarian colonization was a process of creating spaces that conformed to the demands of colonial rule. It entailed establishing a regime of categories—tenancies, tenures, properties, habitations—and a framework of laws that made the change possible. Agrarian colonization was in this sense a deep conquest. Colonialism, the book suggests, has the power to revisualize and reorder social relations and bonds of community. It alters the world radically, even when it seeks to preserve elements of the old. The changes it brings about are simultaneously cultural, discursive, legal, linguistic, spatial, social, and economic. Moving from intent to action, concepts to practices, legal enactments to court battles, official discourses to folklore, this book explores the conflicted and dialogic nature of a transformative process. By analyzing this great conquest, and the often silent ways in which it unfolds, the book asks every historian to rethink the practice of writing agrarian history and reflect on the larger issues of doing history.
In a series of legal battles starting in 1882, South Asian Muslims made up of modernists, traditionalists, reformists, Shias and Sunnis attempted to modify the laws relating to their places of worship. Their efforts failed as the ideals they presented flew in the face of colonial secularism. This book looks at the legal history of Muslim endowments and the intellectual and social history of sectarian identities, demonstrating how these topics are interconnected in ways that affected the everyday lives of mosque congregants across North India. Through the use of legal records, archives and multiple case studies Sana Haroon ties a series of narrative threads stretching across multiple regions in Colonial South Asia.
This book is a thematic history of the communist movement in Kerala, the first major region (in terms of population) in the world to democratically elect a communist government. It analyzes the nature of the transformation brought about by the communist movement in Kerala, and what its implications could be for other postcolonial societies. The volume engages with the key theoretical concepts in postcolonial theory and Subaltern Studies, and contributes to the debate between Marxism and postcolonial theory, especially its recent articulations. The volume presents a fresh empirical engagement with theoretical critiques of Subaltern Studies and postcolonial theory, in the context of their decades-long scholarship in India. It discusses important thematic moments in Kerala’s communist history which include — the processes by which it established its hegemony, its cultural interventions, the institution of land reforms and workers’ rights, and the democratic decentralization project, and, ultimately, communism’s incomplete national-popular and its massive failures with regard to the caste question. A significant contribution to scholarship on democracy and modernity in the Global South, this volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of politics, specifically political theory, democracy and political participation, political sociology, development studies, postcolonial theory, Subaltern Studies, Global South Studies, and South Asia Studies.
Interrogates the explosive potential of revolutionary anti-colonial 'afterlives' in contemporary Indian politics and society.
A number of studies of colonial Lahore in recent years have explored such themes as the city's modernity, its cosmopolitanism and the rise of communalism which culminated in the bloodletting of 1947. This first synoptic history moves away from the prism of the Great Divide of 1947 to examine the cultural and social connections which linked colonial Lahore with North India and beyond. In contrast to portrayals of Lahore as inward looking and a world unto itself, the authors argue that imperial globalisation intensified long established exchanges of goods, people and ideas. Ian Talbot and Tahir Kamran's book is reflective of concerns arising from the global history of Empire and the new urban history of South Asia. These are addressed thematically rather than through a conventional chronological narrative, as the book uncovers previously neglected areas of Lahore's history, including the links between Lahore's and Bombay's early film industries and the impact on the 'tourist gaze' of the consumption of both text and visual representation of India in newsreels and photographs.
What do anti-colonial histories mean for politics in contemporary India? How can we understand a political terrain that appears crowded with the dead, heroic figures from past struggles who call the living to account and demand action? What role do these 'afterlives' play in the inauguration of new politics and the fashioning of possible futures? In this engaging and innovative analysis of anti-colonial afterlives in modern South Asia, Chris Moffat crafts a framework that takes the dead seriously - not as passive entities, ceremonially invoked, but as active interlocutors and instigators in the present. Focusing on the iconic revolutionary martyr Bhagat Singh (1907–1931), Moffat establishes the problem of inheritance as central to the forms and futures of democracy in this postcolonial polity. Tracing Bhagat Singh's revenant presence in India today, he demonstrates how living communities are animated by a sense of obligation, duty or debt to the dead.