The Political Life of Memory

ISBN-13: 9781009337908 / Twarda / 2023 / 320 str.

Rahul (Oslo Metropolitan University) Ranjan

Opis

Situating Birsa Munda as the canon, the book demonstrates how political parties and civil societies mobilise and reproduce his memory.

Recenzje

'Dr Ranjan is a gifted anthropologist. His capacity to involve diverse voices has yielded a rich series of insights. These pertain to the political and cultural afterlives of Birsa Munda, an infamous Adivasi revolutionary from the pre-independence era. Ranjan weaves together the variously social, ideological, aesthetic, archival and religious dimensions of this freedom-fighter's posthumous significance. He carefully documents cultures of memorialisation and counter-memory and uses Subaltern Studies frameworks to address issues like identity-assertion, legal pluralism and inequality. How are narratives of Adivasi resistance, power and belonging configured and reconfigured in modern India? To find out, let us now listen to someone who knows how to listen.' Daniel Rycroft, University of East Anglia

Spis treści

Abbreviations; Glossary of Hindi Terms; List of Illustrations; Preface; 1. Introduction; 2. Claiming the Munda Raj from the Margins: Land, Missionaries, and the Making of Birsa Ulgulan in Chota Nagpur (1845–1900); 3. Memories Set in Stone: Political Aesthetics and the Statue of Birsa Munda in Postcolonial Jharkhand; 4. 'Burying the Dead, Creating the Past': The Making of Memorials, Stone Slabs and Birsa in Jharkhand; 5. Echoes from the Graveyard: Pathalgadi, Birsaites and the Landscape of Memory; 6. Conclusion; Manifesto: Script for the Counter-memorial; Manifesto: Pathways to Anticolonialism, and Thinking about Subaltern Present Past; Appendix; Primary Sources; Published Sources.