A Revolutionary History of Interwar India

A Revolutionary History of Interwar India

Author: Kama Maclean

Publisher: Penguin UK

Published: 2016-03-01

Total Pages: 327

ISBN-13: 9385890859

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Focusing on the Hindustan Socialist Republican Army (HSRA), A Revolutionary History . . . delivers a fresh perspective on the ambitions, ideologies and practices of this influential organization formed by Chandrashekhar Azad and Bhagat Singh, and inspired by transnational anti-imperial dissent. It is a new interpretation of the activities and political impact of the north Indian revolutionaries who advocated the use of political violence against the British. Kama Maclean contends that the actions of these revolutionaries had a direct impact on Congress politics and tested its policy of non-violence. In doing so she draws on visual culture studies, demonstrating the efficacy of imagery in constructing—as opposed to merely illustrating—historical narratives. Maclean analyses visual evidence alongside recently declassified government files, memoirs and interviews to elaborate on the complex relationships between the Congress and the HSRA, which were far less antagonistic than is frequently imagined.


Pilgrimage and Power

Pilgrimage and Power

Author: Kama Maclean

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2008-08-29

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 0199713359

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Today the Kumbh Mela in Allahabad, India, is a major Hindu religious pilgrimage and the largest religious gathering in the world. In 2001, according to the government of Uttar Pradesh, 30 million pilgrims were drawn to the confluence of the rivers Ganga and Yamuna on the most auspicious day for bathing. In an impressive feat of organization and administration, the first mela of the new millennium was managed to the overwhelming satisfaction of most, with an impressive health and safety record. The loudest complaint had to do with the intrusive presence of the media. Journalists, largely representing foreign media outlets, had swarmed to the mela, intent on broadcasting to a global audience sensational images of naked (or wet-sari-clad) Indians taking part in "ancient" religious rituals. Resistance to foreign interference with the mela has roots that go back 200 years. The British colonial state and the colonized had different ideas about what the Kumbh Mela represented: for the former, it was a potentially dangerous gathering that demanded tight regulation and control, but for the latter it was a sacred sphere in which foreign domination and interference were intolerable. In this book Kama Maclean examines this tension and the manner in which it was negotiated by each side. She asks why and how the colonial state tried to manipulate the mela and, more important, how the mela changed as Indians responded to the colonial power. In recent years many scholars have emphasized the extent to which the Kumbh Mela has been monopolized by the Hindu nationalist movement. Maclean seeks to situate the history of the Kumbh Mela in Allahabad within a much broader context. She explores the role of a pilgrimage fair like the Kumbh Mela in disseminating ideas, particularly political ones like nationalism and ideas about social reform. Kama Maclean tells the mesmerizing and important story of the Kumbh Mela with exciting detail as well as careful scholarly attention, illuminating for the reader the full scope of the event's historical and socio-political context.


Revolutionary Pasts

Revolutionary Pasts

Author: Ali Raza

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2020-04-02

Total Pages: 297

ISBN-13: 1108481841

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Raza traces the anti-colonial struggles of Indian revolutionaries in the context of Communist Internationalism during the last decades of the British Raj.


India's Revolutionary Inheritance

India's Revolutionary Inheritance

Author: Chris Moffat

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2019-01-10

Total Pages: 295

ISBN-13: 1108496903

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Interrogates the explosive potential of revolutionary anti-colonial 'afterlives' in contemporary Indian politics and society.


Gentlemanly Terrorists

Gentlemanly Terrorists

Author: Durba Ghosh

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2017-07-20

Total Pages: 293

ISBN-13: 1107186668

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Durba Ghosh uncovers the critical place of revolutionary terrorism in the colonial and postcolonial history of modern India.


Comrades against Imperialism

Comrades against Imperialism

Author: Michele L. Louro

Publisher: Global and International Histo

Published: 2018-03

Total Pages: 327

ISBN-13: 1108419305

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Examines the emergence of anti-imperialist internationalism during the interwar years from the perspective of India's first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru.


Revolutionary Lives in South Asia

Revolutionary Lives in South Asia

Author: Kama Maclean

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-02-05

Total Pages: 137

ISBN-13: 1317637127

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The term ‘revolutionary’ is used liberally in histories of Indian anticolonialism, but scarcely defined. Implicitly understood, it functions as a signpost or a badge, generously conferred in hagiographies, loosely invoked in historiography, and strategically deployed in contemporary political contests. It is timely, then, to ask the question: Who counts as a ‘revolutionary’ in South Asia? How can we read ‘the revolutionary’ in Indian political formations? And what does it really mean to be ‘revolutionary’ in turbulent late colonial times? This volume takes a biographical approach to the question, by examining the life stories of a series of activists, some well known, who all defined themselves in explicitly revolutionary terms in the early twentieth century: Shyamaji Krishnavarma, V. D. Savarkar, M. K. Gandhi, Bhagat Singh, Jawaharlal Nehru, J.P. Narayan and Hansraj Vohra. The authors interrogate the subversive lives of these figures, tracing their polyglot influences and transnational impacts, to map out the discursive travels of ‘the revolutionary’ in Indian historical and literary worlds from the early 1900s, and to indicate its reverberations in the politics of the present. This book was published as a special issue of Postcolonial Studies.


M. N. Roy

M. N. Roy

Author: Kris Manjapra

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2020-11-29

Total Pages: 211

ISBN-13: 1000083640

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This is a work of South Asian intellectual history written from a transnational perspective and based on the life and work of M.N. Roy, one of India’s most formidable Marxist intellectuals. Swadeshi revolutionary, co-founder of the Mexican Communist Party, member of the Communist International Presidium, and a major force in the rise of Indian communism, M.N. Roy was a colonial cosmopolitan icon of the interwar years. Exploring the intellectual production of this important thinker, this book traces the historical context of his ideas from 19th-century Bengal to Weimar Germany, through the tumultuous period of world politics in the 1930s and 1940s, and on to post-Independence India. In this book the author makes a number of valuable theoretical contributions. He argues for the importance of conceiving the ‘deterritorial’ zones of thought and action through which Indian anti-colonial political thought operated, and advances a new periodisation for Swadeshi on this basis. He also argues against viewing ‘international communism’ of the 1920s as a single monolith by highlighting the fractures and contestations that influenced colonial politics worldwide. A fresh and insightful perspective on the history of India in the interwar years, this book will be of great interest to scholars and students of the modern history of South and East Asia, America and Europe, and to those interested in anti-colonial struggles, Communist politics and trajectories of Marxist thought in the 20th century.


Revolutionary Desires

Revolutionary Desires

Author: Ania Loomba

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-07-24

Total Pages: 601

ISBN-13: 1351209698

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Revolutionary Desires examines the lives and subjectivities of militant-nationalist and communist women in India from the late 1920s, shortly after the communist movement took root, to the 1960s, when it fractured. This close study demonstrates how India's revolutionary women shaped a new female – and in some cases feminist – political subject in the twentieth century, in collaboration and contestation with Indian nationalist, liberal-feminist, and European left-wing models of womenhood. Through a wide range of writings by, and about, revolutionary and communist women, including memoirs, autobiographies, novels, party documents, and interviews, Ania Loomba traces the experiences of these women, showing how they were constrained by, but also how they questioned, the gendered norms of Indian political culture. A collection of carefully restored photographs is dispersed throughout the book, helping to evoke the texture of these women’s political experiences, both public and private. Revolutionary Desires is an original and important intervention into a neglected area of leftist and feminist politics in India by a major voice in feminist studies.


The Ethnic Avant-Garde

The Ethnic Avant-Garde

Author: Steven S. Lee

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2015-10-06

Total Pages: 300

ISBN-13: 0231540116

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During the 1920s and 1930s, American minority artists and writers collaborated extensively with the Soviet avant-garde, seeking to build a revolutionary society that would end racial discrimination and advance progressive art. Making what Claude McKay called "the magic pilgrimage" to the Soviet Union, these intellectuals placed themselves at the forefront of modernism, using radical cultural and political experiments to reimagine identity and decenter the West. Shining rare light on these efforts, The Ethnic Avant-Garde makes a unique contribution to interwar literary, political, and art history, drawing extensively on Russian archives, travel narratives, and artistic exchanges to establish the parameters of an undervalued "ethnic avant-garde." These writers and artists cohered around distinct forms that mirrored Soviet techniques of montage, fragment, and interruption. They orbited interwar Moscow, where the international avant-garde converged with the Communist International. The book explores Vladimir Mayakovsky's 1925 visit to New York City via Cuba and Mexico, during which he wrote Russian-language poetry in an "Afro-Cuban" voice; Langston Hughes's translations of these poems while in Moscow, which he visited to assist on a Soviet film about African American life; a futurist play condemning Western imperialism in China, which became Broadway's first major production to feature a predominantly Asian American cast; and efforts to imagine the Bolshevik Revolution as Jewish messianic arrest, followed by the slow political disenchantment of the New York Intellectuals. Through an absorbing collage of cross-ethnic encounters that also include Herbert Biberman, Sergei Eisenstein, Paul Robeson, and Vladimir Tatlin, this work remaps global modernism along minority and Soviet-centered lines, further advancing the avant-garde project of seeing the world anew.