The Aeroplane and the Making of Modern India

The Aeroplane and the Making of Modern India

Author: Aashique Ahmed Iqbal

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2022-10-03

Total Pages: 371

ISBN-13: 0192679198

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From airports crowded with refugees desperate to flee Partition violence to the mountainous battlefields of Kashmir, aircraft proved indispensable to newly independent India. The aeroplane played a small but significant role in India's transformation from a British colony to an independent republic. Through the prism of aviation, both civil and military, 'The Aeroplane and the Making of Modern India' charts India's journey from the Second World War to the nationalization of Indian airline companies in 1953. For independent India, the aeroplane represented not only a powerful means of projecting state power but also a symbol of what it meant to be modern. This was not lost on other contenders for sovereignty in South Asia. Both Pakistan and the Indian princes also invested extensively in aviation in the hopes of bolstering their power and legitimacy in South Asia. Drawing on numerous archives, untapped personal collections, and newspaper reports in India and the United Kingdom, Aashique Iqbal provides the first comprehensive history of the Indian state's engagement with aviation. Featuring a rich cast of characters including Indian maharajas, Polish pilots, American entrepreneurs, Australian adventurers, and British Air Force officers, this book tells the story of how the aeroplane helped make modern India.


Modern Mysore

Modern Mysore

Author: M Shamarao

Publisher: Legare Street Press

Published: 2023-07-18

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781021317506

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This fascinating book offers a comprehensive look at the modern history of Mysore, one of India's most vibrant and dynamic cities. Drawing on a wide range of sources, M. Shamarao provides a detailed account of the city's political, cultural, and economic development over the past century. This is an essential read for anyone interested in the history of India and the challenges and opportunities facing its cities today. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.


Radical Democracy in Modern Indian Political Thought

Radical Democracy in Modern Indian Political Thought

Author: Tejas Parasher

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2023-07-20

Total Pages: 215

ISBN-13: 1009305581

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Between the 1910s and the 1970s, an eclectic group of Indian thinkers, constitutional reformers, and political activists articulated a theory of robustly democratic, participatory popular sovereignty. Taking parliamentary government and the modern nation-state to be prone to corruption, these thinkers advocated for ambitious federalist projects of popular government as alternatives to liberal, representative democracy. Radical Democracy in Modern Indian Political Thought is the first study of this counter-tradition of democratic politics in South Asia. Examining well-known historical figures such as Dadabhai Naoroji, M. K. Gandhi, and M. N. Roy alongside long-neglected thinkers from the Indian socialist movement, Tejas Parasher illuminates the diversity of political futures imagined at the end of the British Empire in South Asia. This book reframes the history of twentieth-century anti-colonialism in novel terms – as a contest over the nature of modern political representation – and pushes readers to rethink accepted understandings of democracy today.


Mysore Modern

Mysore Modern

Author: Janaki Nair

Publisher: U of Minnesota Press

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 357

ISBN-13: 9780816673834

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Rethinking modernity in colonial and postcolonial Indian history


Princely India Re-imagined

Princely India Re-imagined

Author: Aya Ikegame

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-05-07

Total Pages: 234

ISBN-13: 113623909X

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India’s Princely States covered nearly 40 per cent of the Indian subcontinent at the time of Indian independence, and they collapsed after the departure of the British. This book provides a chronological analysis of the Princely State in colonial times and its post-colonial legacies. Focusing on one of the largest and most important of these states, the Princely State of Mysore, it offers a novel interpretation and thorough investigation of the relationship of king and subject in South Asia. The book argues that the denial of political and economic power to the king, especially after 1831 when direct British control was imposed over the state administration in Mysore, was paralleled by a counter-balancing multiplication of kingly ritual, rites, and social duties. The book looks at how, at the very time when kingly authority was lacking income and powers of patronage, its local sources of power and social roots were being reinforced and rebuilt in a variety of ways. Using a combination of historical and anthropological methodologies, and based upon substantial archival and field research, the book argues that the idea of kingship lived on in South India and continues to play a vital and important role in contemporary South Indian social and political life. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.


Singing the Classical, Voicing the Modern

Singing the Classical, Voicing the Modern

Author: Amanda J. Weidman

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2006-07-18

Total Pages: 367

ISBN-13: 0822388057

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While Karnatic music, a form of Indian music based on the melodic principle of raga and time cycles called tala, is known today as South India’s classical music, its status as “classical” is an early-twentieth-century construct, one that emerged in the crucible of colonial modernity, nationalist ideology, and South Indian regional politics. As Amanda J. Weidman demonstrates, in order for Karnatic music to be considered classical music, it needed to be modeled on Western classical music, with its system of notation, composers, compositions, conservatories, and concerts. At the same time, it needed to remain distinctively Indian. Weidman argues that these contradictory imperatives led to the emergence of a particular “politics of voice,” in which the voice came to stand for authenticity and Indianness. Combining ethnographic observation derived from her experience as a student and performer of South Indian music with close readings of archival materials, Weidman traces the emergence of this politics of voice through compelling analyses of the relationship between vocal sound and instrumental imitation, conventions of performance and staging, the status of women as performers, debates about language and music, and the relationship between oral tradition and technologies of printing and sound reproduction. Through her sustained exploration of the way “voice” is elaborated as a trope of modern subjectivity, national identity, and cultural authenticity, Weidman provides a model for thinking about the voice in anthropological and historical terms. In so doing, she shows that modernity is characterized as much by particular ideas about orality, aurality, and the voice as it is by regimes of visuality.