'Rural India Facing the 21st Century' is a unique study of rural development in South India, concluded over a twenty-year period. Set against the context of international, national and state policies, the book focuses on a wide number of themes, including the stagnation of the 'green revolution', growing differentiation and inequality, the ecological crisis, resistance to reform, corruption and the enduring need for state intervention in rural development. Written by an international team of young scholars under the direction of Dr Harris-White, 'Rural India Facing the 21st Century' draws...

Inherent in colonialism was the idea of self-legitimation, the most powerful tool of which was the colonizer's claim to bring the fruits of progress and modernity to the subject people. In colonial logic, people who were different because they were inferior had to be made similar - and hence equal - by civilizing them. However, once this equality had been attained, the very basis for colonial rule would vanish. 'Colonialism as Civilizing Mission' explores British colonial ideology at work in South Asia. Ranging from studies on sport and national education, to pulp fiction to infanticide,...

In 1943 a slim volume of poetry, 'Tar Saptak', burst onto the Hindi literary scene. It gave voice to seven young poets who were determined to experiment both with the content and form of poetry. 'Tar Saptak' heralded the beginning of Prayogvad (Experimentalism), which in turn became Nayi Kavita (New Poetry). Taken from Nayi Kavita, this parallel text anthology interprets it not as a narrow literary movement but as a modernist tendency still flourishing in Hindi poetry.

The collection includes seven poets who first published in one of the Saptaks: Agyeya Muktibodh, Shamsher, Raghuvir...

This major study reconsiders the creation of the Gandhian legend through the myriad texts and images that helped spread it through both India and the Western world. In revealing how the picture of the Mahatma as saint-as-politician was founded on Indian nationalistic selectivity and limited Western representations of Gandhi, Claude Markovits shows how Gandhi's legend has obscured the facts of his public career. Gandhi's professional role in the public sphere, Markovits argues, was heavily influenced by his long and critical phase of maturation in South Africa, a period often dismissed as...

Set against today's context of globalization and the decline of large-scale industry, Lost Worlds is a detailed exploration of the world of labour in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century South Asia. Using a wide range of oral and archival sources as well as popular literature, Chitra Joshi reconstructs working class lives, exploring their everyday worlds at the workplace and within community life, as well as their moments of conflict and struggle. In its analysis of the complex relationship between past and present, memory and history, culture and practice, community and nation,...

'The Bengal Borderland' constitutes the epicentre of the partition of British India. Yet while the forging of international borders between India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Burma (the 'Bengal Borderland') has been a core theme in Partition studies, these crucial borderlands have, remarkably, been largely ignored by historians. While South Asia is poorly represented in borderland studies, the study of South Asian borderlands appears indispensable because here a major and intensely contested experiment in twentieth-century border making took place. Without direct reference to the borderlands...

Sport in South Asia has a long and varied history that is often dramatic, sometimes violent, and which always promises to reveal much about the broader currents that have shaped culture and society. Some 100 years ago, an Indian became the star of England's cricket team, an 'Untouchable' was offered a contract in the English domestic cricket league, and an Indian win in a football match against an English Regiment was celebrated by a crowd of 60,000 as a nationalist victory. Almost a century on, the dead body of an Indian wrestler was paraded at the front of a Hindu crowd in order to...

'Colonial Childhoods' is about the politics of childhood in India between the 1860s and the 1930s. It examines not only the redefinition of the 'child' in the cultural and intellectual climate of colonialism, but also the uses of the child, the parent and the family in colonizing and nationalizing projects. It investigates also the complications of transporting metropolitan discourses of childhood, adulthood and expertise across the lines of race. Focused on reformatories and laws for juvenile delinquents, and boarding schools for aristocratic children, it illuminates a vital area of...

This is one of the earliest books to present a collection of writings on the effects of globalization on India and Indian society. The very concept of globalization needs critical examination, and one productive approach is to focus specifically on the local impacts of globalization in its various guises through comparative ethnographic investigations. Such research also permits examination of the relative significance of globalization, as opposed to national, regional or local factors of change that may actually be more salient. Assayag and Fuller have assembled a team of eminent...

The expansion of Mumbai over the last four centuries has been documented in great detail by both contemporary writers and historians, yet this narrative stands out as an alternative, unique and authentic voice. Quite simply, it is a book about the city like no other. Govind Narayan's 'Mumbaiche Varnan' was the first full account of Mumbai in any language, written just before the explosive growth and renovation of the city.

Guiding the reader on a tour of the sights and sounds of an emerging city struggling to shake off colonialism and wrestling with the formation of its own budding...