Lines of the Nation

Lines of the Nation PDF Author: Laura Bear
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 9780231140027
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 372

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Book Description
Lines of the Nation radically recasts the history of the Indian railways, which have long been regarded as vectors of modernity and economic prosperity. From the design of carriages to the architecture of stations, employment hierarchies, and the construction of employee housing, Laura Bear explores the new public spaces and social relationships created by the railway bureaucracy. She then traces their influence on the formation of contemporary Indian nationalism, personal sentiments, and popular memory. Her probing study challenges entrenched beliefs concerning the institutions of modernity and capitalism by showing that these rework older idioms of social distinction and are legitimized by forms of intimate, affective politics. Drawing on historical and ethnographic research in the company town at Kharagpur and at the Eastern Railway headquarters in Kolkata (Calcutta), Bear focuses on how political and domestic practices among workers became entangled with the moralities and archival technologies of the railway bureaucracy and illuminates the impact of this history today. The bureaucracy has played a pivotal role in the creation of idioms of family history, kinship, and ethics, and its special categorization of Anglo-Indian workers still resonates. Anglo-Indians were formed as a separate railway caste by Raj-era racial employment and housing policies, and other railway workers continue to see them as remnants of the colonial past and as a polluting influence. The experiences of Anglo-Indians, who are at the core of the ethnography, reveal the consequences of attempts to make political communities legitimate in family lines and sentiments. Their situation also compels us to rethink the importance of documentary practices and nationalism to all family histories and senses of relatedness. This interdisciplinary anthropological history throws new light not only on the imperial and national past of South Asia but also on the moral life of present technologies and economic institutions.

Lines of the Nation

Lines of the Nation PDF Author: Laura Bear
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 9780231140027
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 372

Get Book Here

Book Description
Lines of the Nation radically recasts the history of the Indian railways, which have long been regarded as vectors of modernity and economic prosperity. From the design of carriages to the architecture of stations, employment hierarchies, and the construction of employee housing, Laura Bear explores the new public spaces and social relationships created by the railway bureaucracy. She then traces their influence on the formation of contemporary Indian nationalism, personal sentiments, and popular memory. Her probing study challenges entrenched beliefs concerning the institutions of modernity and capitalism by showing that these rework older idioms of social distinction and are legitimized by forms of intimate, affective politics. Drawing on historical and ethnographic research in the company town at Kharagpur and at the Eastern Railway headquarters in Kolkata (Calcutta), Bear focuses on how political and domestic practices among workers became entangled with the moralities and archival technologies of the railway bureaucracy and illuminates the impact of this history today. The bureaucracy has played a pivotal role in the creation of idioms of family history, kinship, and ethics, and its special categorization of Anglo-Indian workers still resonates. Anglo-Indians were formed as a separate railway caste by Raj-era racial employment and housing policies, and other railway workers continue to see them as remnants of the colonial past and as a polluting influence. The experiences of Anglo-Indians, who are at the core of the ethnography, reveal the consequences of attempts to make political communities legitimate in family lines and sentiments. Their situation also compels us to rethink the importance of documentary practices and nationalism to all family histories and senses of relatedness. This interdisciplinary anthropological history throws new light not only on the imperial and national past of South Asia but also on the moral life of present technologies and economic institutions.

How India Became Democratic

How India Became Democratic PDF Author: Ornit Shani
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107068037
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 299

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Book Description
Uncovers the greatest experiment in democratic history: the creation of the electoral roll and universal adult franchise in India.

Citizenship, Community and Democracy in India

Citizenship, Community and Democracy in India PDF Author: Oliver Godsmark
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351188216
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
On 1 May 1960, Bombay Province was bifurcated into the two new provinces of Gujarat and Maharashtra, amidst scenes of great public fanfare and acclaim. This decision marked the culmination of a lengthy campaign for the creation of Samyukta (‘united’) Maharashtra in western India, which had first been raised by some Marathi speakers during the interwar years, and then persistently demanded by Marathi-speaking politicians ever since the mid-1940s. In the context of an impending independence, some of its proponents had envisaged Maharashtra as an autonomous domain encompassing a community of Marathi speakers, which would be constructed around exclusivist notions of belonging and majoritarian democratic frames. As a result, linguistic reorganisation was also quickly considered to be a threat, posing questions for others about the extent to which they belonged to this imagined space. This book delivers ground-breaking perspectives upon nascent conceptions and workings of citizenship and democracy during the colonial/postcolonial transition. It examines how processes of democratisation and provincialisation during the interwar years contributed to demands and concerns and offers a broadened and imaginative outlook on India’s partition. Drawing upon a novel body of archival research, the book ultimately suggests Pakistan might also be considered as just one paradigmatic example of a range of coterminous calls for regional autonomy and statehood, informed by a majoritarian democratic logic that had an extensive contemporary circulation. It will be of interest to academics in the fields of South Asian history in general and the Partition in particular as well as to those interested in British colonialism and postcolonial studies.

Inclusive Growth and Development in India

Inclusive Growth and Development in India PDF Author: Y. Tsujita
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 113740874X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 235

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Book Description
India is one of the fastest growing countries in the world. However, high economic growth is accompanied by social stratification and widening economic disparity between states. This book illustrates some important aspects of underdevelopment and the process by which the underclass is left behind by focusing on the country's most neglected regions.

India At War

India At War PDF Author: Yasmin Khan
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190228911
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 441

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Book Description
World War II was a global catastrophe. Far broader than just the critical struggle between Allies and Axis, its ramifications were felt throughout the world. It was a time of social relocation, reorienting ideas of patriotism and geographical attachment, and forcing the movement of people across oceans and continents. In India at War, Yasmin Khan offers an account of India's role in the conflict, one that takes into consideration the social, economic, and cultural changes that occurred in South Asia between 1939 and 1945-and reveals how vital the Commonwealth's contribution was to the war effort. Khan's sweeping work centers on the lives of ordinary Indian people, exploring the ways they were affected by a cataclysmic war with origins far beyond Indian shores. In manpower alone, India's contribution was staggering; it produced the largest volunteer army in world history, with 2.5 million men. Indians were engaged in making the raw materials and food stuffs needed by the Allies, and became involved in the construction of airstrips, barracks, hospitals, internee camps, roads and railways. Their lives were also profoundly affected by the presence of the large Allied army in the region, including not only British but American, African, and Chinese troops. Madras was bombed by the Japanese and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands were occupied, while the Bengal famine of 1943-in which perhaps three million Bengalis died-was a man-made disaster precipitated by the effects of the war. This authoritative account offers a critically important look at the contributions of colonial manpower and resources essential to sustaining the war, and emphasizes the significant ways in which the conflict shaped modern India.

Claiming Citizenship and Nation

Claiming Citizenship and Nation PDF Author: Aishwarya Pandit
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000410676
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
The book provides insight into the changing nature of Muslim politics and the ideas of citizenship in independent India. It studies the electoral mobilization of minority groups across North India, particularly in Uttar Pradesh where Muslims have been demographically dominant in various constituencies. The volume discusses themes such as the making and unmaking of the ‘Congress heartland’ and the threat of revival of ‘Muslim communalism’, alongside issues of representation, property, language politics, rehabilitation and citizenship, politics of Waqf, personal law and Hindu counter-mobilization. The author utilizes previously unused government and institutional files, private archives, interviews and oral resources to address questions central to Indian politics and society. An important intervention, this book will be useful for scholars and researchers of politics, Indian history, minority studies, law, political studies, nationalism, electoral politics, partition studies, political sociology, sociology and South Asian Studies.

The Oxford Handbook of the Ends of Empire

The Oxford Handbook of the Ends of Empire PDF Author: Martin Thomas
Publisher:
ISBN: 0198713193
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 801

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Book Description
The Oxford Handbook of the Ends of Empire offers the most comprehensive treatment of the causes, course, and consequences of the collapse of empires in the twentieth century. The volume's contributors convey the global reach of decolonization, analysing the ways in which European, Asian, and African empires disintegrated over the past century.

The Company's Sword

The Company's Sword PDF Author: Christina Welsch
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108833888
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 303

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Book Description
Examines the role of the East India Company's independent armies in the colonial government of South Asia.

A People's Constitution

A People's Constitution PDF Author: Rohit De
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691210381
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
It has long been contended that the Indian Constitution of 1950, a document in English created by elite consensus, has had little influence on India’s greater population. Drawing upon the previously unexplored records of the Supreme Court of India, A People’s Constitution upends this narrative and shows how the Constitution actually transformed the daily lives of citizens in profound and lasting ways. This remarkable legal process was led by individuals on the margins of society, and Rohit De looks at how drinkers, smugglers, petty vendors, butchers, and prostitutes—all despised minorities—shaped the constitutional culture. The Constitution came alive in the popular imagination so much that ordinary people attributed meaning to its existence, took recourse to it, and argued with it. Focusing on the use of constitutional remedies by citizens against new state regulations seeking to reshape the society and economy, De illustrates how laws and policies were frequently undone or renegotiated from below using the state’s own procedures. De examines four important cases that set legal precedents: a Parsi journalist’s contestation of new alcohol prohibition laws, Marwari petty traders’ challenge to the system of commodity control, Muslim butchers’ petition against cow protection laws, and sex workers’ battle to protect their right to practice prostitution. Exploring how the Indian Constitution of 1950 enfranchised the largest population in the world, A People’s Constitution considers the ways that ordinary citizens produced, through litigation, alternative ethical models of citizenship.

The Kashmir Conflict

The Kashmir Conflict PDF Author: Rakesh Ankit
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317225252
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 259

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Book Description
This book presents a study of the international dimensions of the Kashmir dispute between India and Pakistan from before its outbreak in October 1947 until the Tashkent Summit in January 1966. By focusing on Kashmir’s under-researched transnational dimensions, it represents a different approach to this intractable territorial conflict. Concentrating on the global context(s) in which the dispute unfolded, it argues that the dispute’s evolution was determined by international concerns that existed from before and went beyond the Indian subcontinent. Based on new and diverse official and personal papers across four countries, the book foregrounds the Kashmir dispute in a twin setting of Decolonisation and the Cold War, and investigates the international understanding around it within the imperatives of these two processes. In doing so, it traces Kashmir’s journey from being a residual irritant of the British Indian Empire, to becoming a Commonwealth embarrassment and its eventual metamorphosis into a security concern in the Cold War climate(s). A princely state of exceptional geo-strategic location, complex religious composition and unique significance in the context of Indian and Pakistani notions of nation and statehood, Kashmir also complicated their relations with Britain, the United States, Soviet Union, China, the Commonwealth countries and the Afro-Arab-Asian world. This book is of interest to scholars in the field of Asian History, Cold War History, Decolonisation and South Asian Studies.