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List of contents
Preface
1. Political Imaginaries: A programme for Twentieth Century Political History, Manu Goswami and Mrinalini Sinha (New York University, USA and University of Michigan, USA)
Genealogies of the Political
2. The Political in Question: Anatomy of a People’s Politics, Mrinalini Sinha (University of Michigan, USA)
3. Mass Satyagraha and the Problem of Collective Power, Karuna Mantena (Columbia University, USA)
4. Conspicuous Communism: Rethinking Early Communism in Late Imperial India, Manu Goswami (New York University, USA)
5. National Wealth or National Poverty? The Politics of Measurement in Late Colonial India, Eleanor Newbigin (SOAS University of London, UK)
6. Law and the Political Imaginary in Mid-Twentieth Century Southern India, Kalyani Ramnath (Princeton University, USA)
7. Remembering the Emergency and the Question of Politics, Mary John (Centre for Women’s Development Studies, Delhi, India)
Recalling Democracy
8. Radicalizing Democracies in India: Three Political Imaginaries, Partha Chatterjee (Columbia University, USA)
9. Institutionalizing Democratic Uncertainties: ‘Election Time’ in the Life of Indian Democracy, Anupama Roy & Ujjwal Kumar Singh (Jawaharlal Nehru University, India)
10. Voting and the Visual: Electoral Symbols, Legal Discourse, & the Sovereign People, David Gilmartin (North Carolina State University, USA)
11. Representations of Electoral Politics: Notes on the Conceptual Power of the ‘Vote Bank’, Satish Deshpande (Delhi University, India)
12. Dispossession and Democracy: The Land Acquisition Act and the Future of India’s Land Wars, Michael Levien (John Hopkins University, USA)
13. Democracy and the Moment of the Political, Aditya Nigam (Centre for Women’s Development Studies, Delhi, India)
Afterword
About the author
Mrinalini Sinha is Alice Freeman Palmer Professor of History at University of Michigan, USA. A historian of Modern South Asia and the British Empire, her books include Colonial Masculinity: the ‘manly Englishman’ and the ‘effeminate Bengali’ in the late 19th century (Manchester, 1995) and Specters of Mother India: The Global Restructuring of an Empire (Duke, 2006).Manu Goswani is Associate Professor of History at New York University, USA. The author of Producing India: From Colonial Economy to National Space (Chicago, 2004), her expertise includes 19th and 20th century India, history of economic thought, political economy and social theory.
Summary
This volume reconsiders India’s 20th century though a specific focus on the concepts, conjunctures and currency of its distinct political imaginaries. Spanning the divide between independence and partition, it highlights recent historical debates that have sought to move away from a nation-centred mode of political history to a broader history of politics that considers the complex contexts within which different political imaginaries emerged in 20th century India.
Representing the first attempt to grasp the shifting modes and meanings of the ‘political’ in India, this book explores forms of mass protest, radical women’s politics, civil rights, democracy, national wealth and mobilization against the indentured-labor system, amongst other themes. In linking ‘the political’ to shifts in historical temporality, Political Imaginaries in 20th century India extends beyond the interdisciplinary arena of South Asian studies to cognate late colonial and post-colonial formations in the twentieth century and contribute to the ‘political turn’ in scholarship.
Foreword
A collection exploring the shifting modes and meanings of ‘the political’ in India during the 20th century.
Additional text
This represents the cutting edge of scholarship on political life modern India. Guided by the strong editorial vision of Manu Goswami and Mrinalini Sinha, this stellar, diverse collection of authors bridges regions, languages, and archives to illuminate the breadth of political imaginaries that have shaped modern India, with reverberations across the Global South. This a vital book, which will appeal widely across fields and disciplines
