From Midnight to Glorious Morning?
From Midnight to Glorious Morning?

Author: Mihir Bose

Publisher: Haus Publishing

Published: 2017-07-03

Total Pages: 413

ISBN-13: 1910376701

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Mihir Bose was born in January 1947. Eight months later, India became a modern, free nation. The country he knew growing up in the 1960s has undergone vast and radical change. India today exports food, sends space probes to Mars, and, all too often, Indian businesses rescue their ailing competitors in the West. In From Midnight to Glorious Morning?, Bose travels the length and breadth of India to explore how a country that many doubted would survive has been transformed into one capable of rivaling China as the world’s preeminent economic superpower. Multifarious challenges still continue to plague the country: although inequality and corruption are issues not unique to India, such a rapid ascent to global prominence creates a precarious position. However, as Bose outlines, this rapid ascent provides evidence that India is ever capable of making great strides in the face of great adversity. Bose’s penetrating analysis of the last seventy years asks what is yet to be done for India in order to fulfill the destiny with which it has been imbued. The predictions of doom in August 1947 have proved to be unfounded; the growth of the nation in population and capital has been exponential, and there is much to celebrate. But Bose’s nuanced, personal, and trenchant book shows that it is naïve to pretend the hoped-for bright morning has yet dawned.

Voices in the Wilderness
Voices in the Wilderness

Author: Anjoo Balhara Sharma

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2019-10-18

Total Pages: 213

ISBN-13: 9388414837

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Whether the Congress party put forth a clichéd argument of accountability versus stability in defence of a parliamentary system, in haste, to enjoy the plums of office is the debate at the core of this book. The author takes the debate out of the realms of academia and into the homes of general readers. Students of history, political science and law have been fed on works of celebrated authors on the making of the Constitution of India. This is only half the story told. This book captures the disquiet among the members of the Constituent Assembly and outbursts by members of the dominant party that its leaders were 'settling' the Constitution behind closed doors. It examines threadbare the conclusion of many scholars that a great amount of deliberation and debate on merit took place in the Constituent Assembly before arriving at a form of government best suited to India. Proposed meaningful and far-reaching amendments made by some members, whom Ambedkar fondly called the 'rebels', were rejected outright, under one pretext or another, to silence dissent. The post-Independence political history of India bears testimony that the apprehensions voiced by these so-called 'rebels' played out to be true. In the Constituent Assembly, however, their voices, pregnant with a warning, were voices in the wilderness.

Indian Liberalism between Nation and Empire
Indian Liberalism between Nation and Empire

Author: Elena Valdameri

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2022-03-10

Total Pages: 263

ISBN-13: 1000553337

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This book analyses the political thought and practice of Gopal Krishna Gokhale (1866–1915), preeminent liberal leader of the Indian National Congress who was able to give a ‘global voice’ to the Indian cause. Using liberalism, nationalism, cosmopolitanism and citizenship as the four main thematic foci, the book illuminates the entanglement of Gopal Krishna Gokhale’s political ideas and action with broader social, political and cultural developments within and beyond the Indian national frame. The author analyses Gokhale’s thinking on a range of issues such as nationhood, education, citizenship, modernity, caste, social service, cosmopolitanism and the ‘women’s question,’ which historians have either overlooked or inserted in a rigid nation-bounded historical narrative. The book provides new enriching dimensions to the understanding of Gokhale, whose ideas remain relevant in contemporary India. A new biography of Gokhale that brings into consideration current questions within historiographical debates, this book is a timely and welcome addition to the fields of intellectual history, the history of political thought, Colonial history and Indian and South Asian history.

Genius & Anxiety
Genius & Anxiety

Author: Norman Lebrecht

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2019-12-03

Total Pages: 464

ISBN-13: 1982134232

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This lively chronicle of the years 1847­–1947—the century when the Jewish people changed how we see the world—is “[a] thrilling and tragic history…especially good on the ironies and chain-reaction intimacies that make a people and a past” (The Wall Street Journal). In a hundred-year period, a handful of men and women changed the world. Many of them are well known—Marx, Freud, Proust, Einstein, Kafka. Others have vanished from collective memory despite their enduring importance in our daily lives. Without Karl Landsteiner, for instance, there would be no blood transfusions or major surgery. Without Paul Ehrlich, no chemotherapy. Without Siegfried Marcus, no motor car. Without Rosalind Franklin, genetic science would look very different. Without Fritz Haber, there would not be enough food to sustain life on earth. What do these visionaries have in common? They all had Jewish origins. They all had a gift for thinking in wholly original, even earth-shattering ways. In 1847, the Jewish people made up less than 0.25% of the world’s population, and yet they saw what others could not. How? Why? Norman Lebrecht has devoted half of his life to pondering and researching the mindset of the Jewish intellectuals, writers, scientists, and thinkers who turned the tides of history and shaped the world today as we know it. In Genius & Anxiety, Lebrecht begins with the Communist Manifesto in 1847 and ends in 1947, when Israel was founded. This robust, magnificent, beautifully designed volume is “an urgent and moving history” (The Spectator, UK) and a celebration of Jewish genius and contribution.