Based On Documents, The Thrust Of The Volume Is To Show That It Is Erroneous To Believe That Sardar Patel Was Anti-Muslims. It Seeks To Show His Benevolent Attitude Towards Muslims And How He Saved The Hindu Refugees From Both East And West Pakistan.
Colonial Bureaucracy and Contemporary Citizenship examines how the legacies of colonial bureaucracy continue to shape political life after empire. Focusing on the former British colonies of India, Cyprus, and Israel/Palestine, the book explores how post-colonial states use their inherited administrative legacies to classify and distinguish between loyal and suspicious subjects and manage the movement of populations, thus shaping the practical meaning of citizenship and belonging within their new boundaries. The book offers a novel institutional theory of 'hybrid bureaucracy' to explain how racialized bureaucratic practices were used by powerful administrators in state organizations to shape the making of political identity and belonging in the new states. Combining sociology and anthropology of the state with the study of institutions, this book offers new knowledge to overturn conventional understandings of bureaucracy, demonstrating that routine bureaucratic practices and persistent colonial logics continue to shape unequal political status to this day.
This revised and updated new edition of the Routledge Handbook of Contemporary India concentrates on India as it emerged after the economic reforms and the new economic policy of the 1980s and 1990s and as it develops in the twenty-first century. It presents new developments and advancements in the research literature and includes discussions of the major political change in India since the Hindu nationalist party Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) came to power in 2014. This Handbook contains chapters by the field’s foremost scholars dealing with fundamental issues in India’s current cultural and social transformation. This new edition also contains six new chapters on topics not covered by the first edition, such as changes caused by the Hindu majoritarian political ideology, the Hinduization process in the northeast of India and contemporary Dalit and Adivasi literatures. Following an introduction by the editor, the book is divided into five parts: Part I: Foundation Part II: India and the world Part III: Society, class, caste and gender Part IV: Religion and diversity Part V: Cultural change and innovations Exploring the cultural changes and innovations relating a number of contexts in contemporary India, this Handbook is essential reading for students and scholars interested in Indian and South Asian culture, politics and society.
Exploring violent confrontation between the state and the population in colonial and postcolonial India, this book is both a study of the many techniques of colonial coercion and state violence and a cultural history of the different ways in which Indians imbued practices of punishment with their own meanings and reinterpreted acts of state violence in their own political campaigns. This work examines state violence from a historical perspective, expanding the study of punishment beyond the prison by investigating the interplay between imprisonment, corporal punishment, collective fines and state violence. It provides a fresh look at seminal events in the history of mid-twentieth century India, such as the massacre at Jallianwala Bagh, the non-cooperation and civil disobedience movements, the Quit India campaign, and the Hindu-Muslim riots of the 1930s and 1940s. The book extends its analysis into the postcolonial period by considering the ways in which partition and then the struggle against a communist insurgency reshaped practices of punishment and state violence in the first decade after independence. Ultimately, this research challenges prevailing conceptions of the nature of the state in colonial and postcolonial India, which have tended to assume that the state had the ambition and the ability to use the police, military and bureaucracy to dominate the population at will. It argues, on the contrary, that the state in twentieth-century India tended to be self-limiting, vulnerable, and replete with tensions. Relevant to those interested in contemporary India and the history of empire and decolonisation, this work provides a new framework for the study of state violence which will be invaluable to scholars of South Asian studies; violence, crime and punishment; and colonial and postcolonial history.
According To This Book, Contrary To General Perceptions Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel Was Not At Loggerheads With The Three Stalwarts Of The Congress--Gandhi, Nehru And Subhas Bose.
This is the first-ever publication of the hitherto unknown diary of Sardar Patel's daughter. Maniben generally accompanied Patel everywhere and was present with the Sardar at most of his meetings. She was therefore privy to what transpired in these meetings and also to Sardar's views and innermost thoughts on various historic and sensitive issues which he often could not otherwise express even to his closest friends and colleagues. Then, too, having earlier spent many years looking after Gandhi, and possessed of high intelligence, Maniben understood both the context and the significance of the unfolding events and the dramatis personae of the times. The diary runs from 8 June 1936 till Sardar's death on 15 December 1950, and is particularly detailed after Patel's release from jail in 1945. It offers a wealth of often revealing, sometimes explosive details and insights into that defining period in India's history which encompasses the country's independence, partition, integration of the princely states, Gandhi's assassination, and then the initial, crucial years of India's self-governance, in all of which Patel's was an indispensable, pivotal role.
With his initial plans for an independent India in tatters, the desperate viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, turned to his seniormost Indian civil servant, Vappala Pangunni Menon—or VP—giving him a single night to devise an alternative, coherent and workable plan for independence. Menon met his stringent deadline, presenting the Menon Plan, which would change the map of the world forever. Menon was unarguably the architect of the modern Indian state. Yet startlingly little is known about this bureaucrat, patriot and visionary. In this definitive biography, Menon’s great-granddaughter, Narayani Basu, rectifies this travesty. She takes us through the highs and lows of his career, from his determination to give women the right to vote; to his strategy, at once ruthless and subtle, to get the princely states to accede to India; to his decision to join forces with the Swatantra Party; to his final relegation to relative obscurity. Equally, the book candidly explores the man behind the public figure— his unconventional personal life and his private conflicts, which made him channel his energy into public service. Drawing from documents—scattered, unread and unresearched until now—and with unprecedented access to Menon’s papers and his taped off-the-record and explosively frank interviews—this remarkable biography of VP Menon not only covers the life and times of a man unjustly consigned to the footnotes of history but also changes our perception of how India, as we know it, came into being.