War and Nationalism in South Asia: The Indian State and the Nagas

ISBN-13: 9780415437417 / Angielski / Twarda / 2008 / 224 str.

Marcus Franke

Opis

This book presents and analyzes the oldest sub-national war of postcolonial South Asia, the one between the Indian state and the Nagas of Northeast India.

By way of a historical analysis, Marcus Franke demonstrates that agency and identity-formation are an on-going process that neither started nor ended with colonialism. Although the interaction of the local population with colonialism produced a Naga national élite, it was the Indian political class that came into existence, the same way it succeeded in having access to superior means of nation and state-building, that enabled it to undertake the modern Indo-Naga war. It was this war that firmly made the Nagas into a 'nation' – setting them onto the road to independence.

War and Nationalism in South Asia fundamentally revises our understanding of the existing 'histories' of the Nagas by exposing them as historical - consciously or unconsciously – influenced by colonial or post-colonial narratives of domination. Furthermore, it gives a new approach to the study of nationalism and war in South Asia in general, by placing it into the longue durée of state formation with its involved technique of imperial rule.

Spis treści

Introduction  1. British Imperial Expansion and Historical Agency – 1820s–1850s  2. The Nagas, the Angami Case – Polity and War, 1820s–1880  3. Imperial Conquest and Withdrawal, 1860s–1947  4. The Transformation of Naga Societies under Colonialism  5. Nation-building and the Nagas, 1947–64  6. The Nagas’ War  7. Divide-and-Rule  8. From Nation to Civil Society.  Conclusion

O autorze

Marcus Franke is Visiting Lecturer at the South Asian Institute, Heidelberg, Germany. His current research focuses on the cosmology of political élites.