The History of History


Book Description

"This study concentrates on the politics of history-writing, offering a nuanced account of how historical thinking and the discipline of history began to assume importance in colonial and independent India. Along with discussions of the role of historians in the dispute over the now-destroyed Babri Masjid and the so-called 'saffronization' of history textbooks, the book also engages with Subaltern Studies, and provides insights into iconic debates over Shivaji, Aurangzeb, beef-eating, and the relationship between history and the nation state." "With a new Postscript that takes into account recent developments, this highly readable account of the rise of history will appeal to students and scholars of postcolonial and culture studies, historians, social scientists, and informed general readers interested in the role of history in the public domain."--BOOK JACKET.




A History of Modern India


Book Description

This book provides an interpretive and comprehensive account of the history of India between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, a crucial epoch characterized by colonialism, nationalism and the emergence of the independent Indian Union. It explores significant historiographical debates concerning the period while highlighting important new issues, especially those of gender, ecology, caste, and labour. The work combines an analysis of colonial and independent India in order to underscore ideologies, policies, and processes that shaped the colonial state and continue to mould the Indian nation.




A Concise History of Modern India


Book Description

In a second edition of their successful Concise History of Modern India, Barbara Metcalf and Thomas Metcalf explore India's modern history afresh and update the events of the last decade. These include the takeover of Congress from the seemingly entrenched Hindu nationalist party in 2004, India's huge advances in technology and the country's new role as a major player in world affairs. From the days of the Mughals, through the British Empire, and into Independence, the country has been transformed by its institutional structures. It is these institutions which have helped bring about the social, cultural and economic changes that have taken place over the last half century and paved the way for the modern success story. Despite these advances, poverty, social inequality and religious division still fester. In response to these dilemmas, the book grapples with questions of caste and religious identity, and the nature of the Indian nation.




A History of Modern India


Book Description

This book provides an interpretive and comprehensive account of the history of India between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, a crucial epoch characterized by colonialism, nationalism and the emergence of the independent Indian Union. It explores significant historiographical debates concerning the period while highlighting important new issues, especially those of gender, ecology, caste, and labour. The work combines an analysis of colonial and independent India in order to underscore ideologies, policies, and processes that shaped the colonial state and continue to mould the Indian nation.




The Origins of Modern Historiography in India


Book Description

This book uncovers practices surrounding acts of collecting, surveying, and antiquarianism during British colonial rule in India. By examining these practices, this book traces the colonial conditions of the production of 'sources,' the forging of a new historical method, and the ascendance of positivist historiography in nineteenth-century India.




India


Book Description

A place of astonishing contrasts, India is home to some of the world’s most ancient architectures as well as some of its most modern. It was the focus of some of the most important works created by Le Corbusier and Louis Kahn, among other lesser-known masters, and it is regarded by many as one of the key sites of mid-twentieth century architectural design. As Peter Scriver and Amit Srivastava show in this book, however, India’s history of modern architecture began long before the nation’s independence as a modern state in 1947. Going back to the nineteenth century, Scriver and Srivastava look at the beginnings of modernism in colonial India and the ways that public works and patronage fostered new design practices that directly challenged the social order and values invested in the building traditions of the past. They then trace how India’s architecture embodies the dramatic shifts in Indian society and culture during the last century. Making sense of a broad range of sources, from private papers and photographic collections to the extensive records of the Indian Public Works Department, they provide the most rounded account of modern architecture in India that has yet been available.




Reproductive Politics and the Making of Modern India


Book Description

Open-access edition: DOI 10.6069/9780295748856 Beginning in the late nineteenth century, India played a pivotal role in global conversations about population and reproduction. In Reproductive Politics and the Making of Modern India, Mytheli Sreenivas demonstrates how colonial administrators, postcolonial development experts, nationalists, eugenicists, feminists, and family planners all aimed to reform reproduction to transform both individual bodies and the body politic. Across the political spectrum, people insisted that regulating reproduction was necessary and that limiting the population was essential to economic development. This book investigates the often devastating implications of this logic, which demonized some women’s reproduction as the cause of national and planetary catastrophe. To tell this story, Sreenivas explores debates about marriage, family, and contraception. She also demonstrates how concerns about reproduction surfaced within a range of political questions—about poverty and crises of subsistence, migration and claims of national sovereignty, normative heterosexuality and drives for economic development. Locating India at the center of transnational historical change, this book suggests that Indian developments produced the very grounds over which reproduction was called into question in the modern world. The open-access edition of Reproductive Politics and the Making of Modern India is freely available thanks to the TOME initiative and the generous support of The Ohio State University Libraries.




Water and the Environmental History of Modern India


Book Description

This important new study investigates the competing demand for water in the Bhavani and Noyyal River basins of south India from the early 19th century to the early 21st century from a historical perspective. In doing so, the book addresses several important questions: * Did policy-makers visualise the future demand while diverting water from distant places or other basins? * Was efficient use ensured when the water was diverted or was it diverted in a manner that resulted in pollution and serious damage to the entire river basin? * Were natural flows taken care of in order to preserve the ecology and environment? * What were the factors that aggravated the competing demand for water and what were the consequences for the future? In the context of the current discourse on the competing demands for water, this book takes the debate forward, expanding the horizon of environmental history in the process. Until now, agriculture, industry and domestic water supply and their consequences for ecology, the environment and livelihoods have been given scant attention. Velayutham Saravanan's comprehensive account of both the colonial and post-colonial periods corrects this shortcoming in the field's literature and gives a holistic understanding of the problem and its full historical roots.




Modern India


Book Description

India has become one of the world's emerging powers, rivaling China in terms of global influence. Yet people still know relatively little about the cultural changes unfolding in India today. Craig Jeffrey looks at the history of India, and considers the questions and challenges facing it today, informed by the everyday stories of Indian citizens.




Brothers Against the Raj


Book Description

Subhas Chandra Bose and his brother Sarat were among the most important leaders of the Indian struggle for independence. Brothers Against the Raj is the definitive biography of the Bose brothers, placing them in the context of the Indian freedom struggle and the turbulent international politics of the period. Leonard A. Gordon uses material gathered from archives, records and over 150 interviews he conducted with the brothers' political contemporaries and family members, as well as hundreds of unpublished letters, to bring to life once more two of India's most controversial leaders during one of the most significant epochs in Indian history. "[A] distinguished book... Mr. Gordon is a thorough scholar..." "one of the books of the year for 1990." "Gordon has done full justice to the Bose brothers, giving them their due and recounting their story in the context of the turbulent times in which they lived." "Professor Gordon has... conducted exhaustive and painstaking research and put its fruits into an eminently readable book. Besides, he has skilfully put the story of their lives into the context of the complex politics of India and Bengal of their times." "The author is a New Yorker but knows Calcutta well... The entire distinguished family seems to come alive as he writes, but he is careful to paint them with their warts intact." "[An] extraordinary, informative, and insightful study of Subhas and Sarat Bose." " I have found the book informative and absorbing. [ Gordon has] managed to combine empathy with objectivity- not an easy feat."