Specters of Mother India tells the complex story of one episode that became the tipping point for an important historical transformation. The event at the center of the book is the massive international controversy that followed the 1927 publication of Mother India, an exposé written by the American journalist Katherine Mayo. Mother India provided graphic details of a variety of social ills in India, especially those related to the status of women and to the part...

This book is about the processes and practices through which two differently positioned elites, among the colonisers and the colonised, were constituted respectively as the 'manly Englishman' and the 'effeminate Bengali'. It argues that the emerging dynamics between colonial and nationalist politics in the 1880s and 1890s in India is best captured in the logic of colonial masculinity. The figures of the 'manly Englishman' and the 'effeminate Bengali' were thus constituted in relation to co...

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 ...

South Asian History has enjoyed a remarkable renaissance over the past thirty years. Its historians are not only producing new ways of thinking about the imperial impact and legacy on South Asia, but also helping to reshape the study of imperial history in general. The essays in this collection address a number of these important developments, delineating not only the complicated interplay between imperial rulers and their subjects in India, but also illuminating the economic, political, e...

A groundbreaking retelling of the advent of British rule in Sri Lanka.How did the modern nation of Sri Lanka come to be? In search of an answer to this question, Islanded returns us to the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and to the advance of the British on the kingdom of Kandy. This advance saw the fall of the last foothold of kingly rule, centered in the highlands of the island. The British undertook a process of “islanding” and “partition...

In this study of British middle-class feminism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Antoinette Burton explores an important but neglected historical dimension of the relationship between feminism and imperialism. Demonstrating how feminists in the United Kingdom appropriated imperialistic ideology and rhetoric to justify their own right to equality, she reveals a variety of feminisms grounded in notions of moral and racial superiority. According to Burton, Victorian and Ed...

THE IDEA OF INDIA was originally published to mark the 50th anniversary of India's independence and has since established itself as a uniquely valuable and authoritative book on a key subject. At the heart of India's self-image since independence has been 'the idea of India' - modern, technocratic, egalitarian, secular - but the tensions between the idea and the reality have become almost intolerable. With the legacy of Nehru and Gandhi everywhere under attack and ferociously religious and...

Adopting a historical conceptual approach, this book examines the gendering of citizenship. It argues that through successive historical periods, `becoming a citizen has involved a gradual extension of the status, to more and more persons and groups, in particular, women, which resulted in a more inclusive and egalitarian structure. But, the promise of equal membership in the politcal community masks the exclusionary framework that defines citizenship as found in caste hierarchies, gender di...

A classic work in postcolonial studies, Masks of Conquest describes the introduction of English studies in India under British rule and illuminates the discipline's transcontinental movements and derivations, showing that the origins of English studies are as diverse and diffuse as its future shape. In her new preface, Gauri Viswanathan argues forcefully that the curricular study of English can no longer be understood innocently of or inattentively to the imperial contexts in whic...

This is the second edition of a remarkable study of a young woman's defiant stand against Hindu orthodoxy and the colonial legal establishment in the late nineteenth century India. It revolves around a suit for 'restitution of conjugal rights' filed against Rukhmabai, who was married at age eleven and refused to go and live with her husband. This lucid and engaging account captures the dramatic unfolding of the litigation, as well as the huge social and political debate set off by it. The ...

India's Power Elite is a study of the nature of power and elitism in postcolonial India. Its point of departure is the political transition under way in twenty-first-century India, with the marginalization of the Congress Party and the staging of a cultural revolution symbolized by the rise of Hindu majoritarianism. Baru deconstructs the morphology of the Indian power elite-comprising remnants of a feudal gentry, kulaks, a metropolitan business class, the civil services and a cultural elit...

'Praful Bidwai's analysis and conclusions compel serious engagement both by academics and political leaders.' - K.N. Panikkar'Bidwai's assessments will undoubtedly trigger further discussion.' - Romila Thapar'Praful raises the right questions and is scrupulously fair.' - Susan GeorgeIndia still has a significant and relatively powerful communist movement. In spite of the massive set...