About the Book A SEARING ACCOUNT OF 1984, PACKED WITH STORIES AND MEMORIES. ‘I want sukh, peace,’ said Shanti. She had watched her three sons, one of them an infant, and husband torched alive by marauding mobs. The sixty-five-year-old Sikh woman from a west Delhi slum said that the police had inserted a stick inside her. The distraught man spoke a single sentence but repeated it twice in chaste Punjabi: ‘Please give me a turban. I want nothing else.’ In the aftermath of Indira Gandhi’s assassination in 1984, 2,733 Sikhs were burnt, stabbed, beaten and otherwise hunted to their deaths across Delhi. Many of them were children. Several hundreds were killed elsewhere in the country. Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay uses personal histories to expose the truth of a state-sponsored riot: the thousands of lives that were destroyed, the cruel apathy of subsequent governments, the lack of reparations, the denial of justice. Poignant and raw, Sikhs: The Untold Agony of 1984 lays bare the innards of one of the most shameful episodes of sectarian violence in post-Independence India.
This book presents a comprehensive theoretical study of fictional and non-fictional narratives of 1984 anti-Sikh violence in India. This volume contributes to the expanding field of trauma and memory studies in literature through an interdisciplinary approach. It takes perspectives from the fields of neurobiology, sociology, psychology, and literary theory to offer an integrative and fresh approach to reading and locating trauma in narratives. Going beyond a simple reading of silence, the author discusses themes which encompass othering of the Sikh body; visual, echoic, and olfactory memories; somatic expressions of trauma; experiences of women and instances of rape and sexual atrocities; and children as young witnesses and intergenerational trauma, to understand questions of agency and politics of remembering. Incisive and invigorating, this book is a must read for students of memory and trauma studies, Sikh studies, South Asian literature, gender studies, English studies, postcolonial studies, cultural studies, psychology, exclusion studies, and political sociology.
The multicultural world of today is often said to be marked by a certain kind of exoticization: a “fetishizing process”, as Graham Huggan has called it, which separates a “first world” from a “third world”, the Occident from the Orient. The essays collected here re-assess this tendency, not least by focusing on the kinds of intellectual tourism and dilettantism to which it has given rise. The wider context of these analyses is a postcolonial scenario where literatures and languages can move from the “exotic” to the comparatively “familiar” space of contemporary writings; where an exotic mythos can live on into the familiar present; and where certain perceptions and representations of peoples, of literatures, and of languages have turned exoticization and familiarization into global modes of mass-cultural consumption. Especially by exploring the liminalities between different cultures, this collection manages to trace both the history and the politics of exoticist representation and, in so doing, to make a significant critical intervention.
The story of a political prisoner’s coming of age as a student activist in India Keeping Up the Good Fight is the story of a young man’s political coming of age and his experience as a student activist and scientist incarcerated by two authoritarian regimes in India, half a century apart. On September 25, 1975, the students of Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi called for a strike to protest the expulsion of Ashoklata Jain, an elected student union member. Three months earlier, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had declared a state of Emergency. It was the second day of the strike and the campus was tense. A black car rolled up near a group of students. A few plainclothes cops got out, and abducted one of them: The student spent the next year in jail. Almost fifty years later, on February 9, 2021, the founder of an online news portal saw his home and offices raided for 113 hours straight, ransacked by officers from the Enforcement Directorate. Nearly two years later, on October 3, 2023, the Delhi Police Special Cell reappeared. The founder of the news portal and his colleague were remanded to custody under the dreaded Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA). That student journalist and scientist, Prabir Purkayastha, tells his own story with wit and humor, as he engages with some of India’s most pressing social, political and economic issues across the decades—and remains committed to “keeping up the good fight.”
About the Book THE FIRST AUTHORITATIVE BIOGRAPHY OF INDIA’S CURRENT PRIME MINISTER On 26 December 2012, Narendra Modi was sworn in as the Chief Minister of Gujarat for the fourth time, to extend his record tenure in office. Even then, his name prompted extremes of hate-filled anger or outright adulation. Since then, despite polarising Gujarat and India in more ways than one, he continues to do what it takes to survive in a democracy: win elections. Written by veteran journalist and writer, Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay, after several in-depth interviews, meticulous research and extensive travel through Gujarat, this book reveals hitherto unknown aspects of Narendra Modi's psyche: as a six year-old boy selling tea to help out his father and distributing badges and raising slogans at the behest of a local political leader, abandoning his family and wife in search of his definition of truth, being initiated into the RSS as a fledgling who ran errands for his seniors and finally, his meteoric rise after 2002. Narendra Modi: The Man, The Times is the definitive biography of a man who may have challenged the basic principles of a sovereign, secular nation, but emerged as an undisputed and larger-than-life leader.
This book reconceptualises the idea of communalism in independent India. It locates the changing contours of politics and religion in the country from the colonial times to the present day, and makes an important intervention in understanding the relationship between communalism and communal violence. It evaluates the role of state, media, civil societies, political parties, and other actors in the process as well as ideas such as secularism, nationalism, minority rights and democracy. Using new conceptual tools and an interdisciplinary approach, the work challenges the conventional understanding of communalism as time and context independent. This second edition includes a Foreword by Romila Thapar and an Afterword by Dipesh Chakrabarty, along with a new Introduction which revaluate the trajectory of communal politics in contemporary India, and question how secularism has come to be understood today. This topical volume will be useful to scholars and researchers in South Asian politics, political science, history, sociology and social anthropology, as well as the interested general reader.
Roughly 200 million today, Indian Muslims are greater than the population of Britain and France or Germany put together. According to the Indian Constitution, Indian Muslims are treated as political equals, which is what India’s secular polity promised after its independence, encouraging more than 35 million Indian Muslims at the time of Partition to choose India as their motherland over Pakistan. However, the supposed relationship of equality between Hindus and Muslims as scripted in the constitution is being increasingly replaced by the domineering tendencies of a Hindu majority in India today. The author describes the current state and position of Indian Muslims (the seeds for which were sown when the BJP came to power in 2014) as the thirdpolitical moment; the second he believes was in 1947 when the community was given equal status in the Indian Constitution; and the first, was in 1857 when Indian Muslims learnt to live under the British colonial state. As he states, there is no denying that political circumstances for Indian Muslims were not completely ideal or full of democratic energy prior to the rise of the Hindu Right since the late 1980s. With numerous layers defined by language, ethnicity, region, etc., Muslims have the most heterogeneous identity, representing India’s quintessential diversity. And yet, Muslims are perceived as the most enduring well-grounded threat to the majoritarian project of the Hindu Rashtra. Indian Muslims are perceived or presented as perpetrators of violence and violators of law, even if they are at the receiving end. They are viewed as an internal enemy, who need to be dealt with for political, social, historical, and ideological reasons. Going forward, the community must formulate the language of democratic rights of Indian Muslims as equal citizens and define the ethics of human dignity in their struggle to reassert their place in India’s political power structures at all levels: from panchayat to Parliament. While the economic future or cultural rights of Indian Muslims have been debated since 1947, it is the political future that demands attention because only as an equal and participatory community in the politics of the nation, can economic and cultural futures be addressed. This book explores the political future of Indian Muslims in this context. From Shaheen Bagh to Hindu-Muslim riots, from the unique position of Muslim women in India to the Sachar Report and the Muslim backwardness debate, Mujibur Rehman analyses, confronts and discusses the urgent concerns of Indian Muslims in a manner that is nuanced and globally relevant.
Ideology and Organization in Indian Politics examines the immense changes that have occurred in Indian politics over the past decade and its impact on the Indian National Congress. The impact is most apparent in the changing fortunes of the Congress party, which suffered two major defeats in 2014 and 2019 elections, bringing the party's crisis to the front and centre of public debate. This book seeks to understand the reasons for these enormous changes by looking first at the underlying conditions that led to the decline of the Congress and, second, the challenges' both external and internal' confronting the Congress and, while doing so, estimating its impact on Indian politics and on the Congress. More specifically, it looks at how important ideological debates provoked by the rise of majoritarianism, the Gujarat model, hypernationalism, the secular retreat, and the curbs and restrictions on the opposition influenced Congress. Exploring ideological shifts and organizational limits that shaped the decline of the Congress makes a compelling case for the significance of the Congress story in understanding the larger political transformation underway in India. The argument centers on the Congress party, but comparatively speaking, it has relevance for the experience of centrist and centre-left parties in other countries, which too suffered a decline in the context of the upsurge of populist nationalism and right-wing politics in the past few years. Analysis of political change in India in the past decade affords insights into the processes of transformation and polarization that grounded the Congress party and centrist parties in other countries as well.
