Working at the interface of historical and fictional writing, Ralph Crane considers the history of India from the Revolt of 1857 to the Emergency of 1975 as it is presented in the works of twentieth-century novelists, both Indian and British, who have written about particular periods of Indian history from within various periods of literary history. A constant thread in the book is the exploration of the use of paintings as iconography and allegory, used in the novels to reveal aspects of British-Indian relationships.
Working at the interface of historical and fictional writing, Ralph Crane considers the history of India from the Revolt of 1857 to the Emergency of 1975 as it is presented in the works of twentieth-century novelists, both Indian and British, who have written about particular periods of Indian history from within various periods of literary history. A constant thread in the book is the exploration of the use of paintings as iconography and allegory, used in the novels to reveal aspects of British-Indian relationships.
This first volume in the series looks at a region that is all too often viewed through the prism of European experience: India and Pakistan. Ian Talbot provides a wide-ranging study of nationalism in a non-European context, showing how the 'invention' of modern India and Pakistan drew heavily for inspiration on indigenous values. Analyzing both the effects of colonial rule and the post-colonial aftermath, the book is a readable and up-to-date introduction to the major issues in the contemporary history of the sub-continent and an examination of a recent trend in historical writing to emphasize the extent to which nations are made, not born. The book explores whether the forging of the nation is a matter of conscious manipulation by an elite or guided by more popular imperatives or a combination of the two.
The “Middle East” has long been an indispensable and ubiquitous term in discussing world affairs, yet its history remains curiously underexplored. Few question the origin of the term or the boundaries of the region, commonly understood to have emerged in the twentieth century after World War I. Guillemette Crouzet offers a new account in Inventing the Middle East. The book traces the idea of the Middle East to a century-long British imperial zenith in the Indian subcontinent and its violent overspill into the Persian Gulf and its hinterlands. Encroachment into the Gulf region began under the expansionist East India Company. It was catalyzed by Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt and heightened by gunboat attacks conducted in the name of pacifying Arab “pirates.” Throughout the 1800s the British secured this crucial geopolitical arena, transforming it into both a crossroads of land and sea and a borderland guarding British India’s western flank. Establishing this informal imperial system involved a triangle of actors in London, the subcontinent, and the Gulf region itself. By the nineteenth century’s end, amid renewed waves of inter-imperial competition, this nexus of British interests and narratives in the Gulf region would occasion the appearance of a new name: the Middle East. Charting the spatial, political, and cultural emergence of the Middle East, Inventing the Middle East reveals the deep roots of the twentieth century’s geographic upheavals.
This book explores examples of this process of invention and addresses the complex interaction of past and present in a fascinating study of ritual and symbolism.
Kiberd - one of Ireland's leading critics and a central figure in the FIELD DAY group with Brian Friel, Seamus Deane and the actor Stephen Rea - argues that the Irish Literary Revival of the 1890-1922 period embodied a spirit and a revolutionary, generous vision of Irishness that is still relevant to post-colonial Ireland. This is the perspective from which he views Irish culture. His history of Irish writing covers Yeats, Lady Gregory, Synge, O'Casey, Joyce, Beckett, Flann O'Brien, Elizabeth Bowen, Heaney, Friel and younger writers down to Roddy Doyle.
‘Religion is a tool in the hands of the oppressor against the oppressed solely because he frames the commandments and calls them the God’s’, is an apt description of the Hindu social order. The book rips open the raw nerve of Hinduism—its invidious castes, positioned as a ‘God-ordained’ institution, commandeered by its freebooter priestly class while clandestinely establishing its religious, social and political hegemony through interpolation of its pristine and effulgent scriptures. The author boldly analyses this imbroglio through a microscopic analysis of these and more related issues: • How priests controlled the Hindu religious, social, educational and political apparatus? • How the dominant priestly class fractured the society into mutually antagonistic subordinated hierarchical segments, and ruled it by reserving all elite jobs for itself? • How the fiendish priesthood emasculated shudras by depriving them of the ‘shaastra and shastra’ (education and arms) and made them permanent ‘village servant classes’? • How the pretensions of attaining siddhis through 'meditation and penances' established priests as the ‘gods on earth’ for their assertions of ‘purity and effulgence’? • How ‘karma’, ‘reincarnation’ and ‘84-lakhs births’ theories were devised to justify fatalism and hierarchical gradation of varnas? • Can India be rightfully called the ‘vishvaguru’ and the mother of all civilisations? • How Buddhism effeminated Hindus and made them the doormats for the ruthless? • Why Hindus had to abandon their own, to adop foreign institutions of governance? • Why Hinduism should become a universal and proselytising faith and fight demographic challenges posed by Islam and Christianity?
The vivid picture of the Victorian Age unfolds as inventions from the ground-breaking - such as aspirin, dynamite, and the telephone - to the everyday - like blue jeans and tiddlywinks - are revealed decade by decade. Together they provide a vivid picture of Victorian life."--BOOK JACKET.
