This book analyzes the diverse facets of the social history of health and medicine in colonial India. It explores a unique set of themes that capture the diversities of India, such as public health, medical institutions, mental illness and the politics and economics of colonialism. Based on inter-disciplinary research, the contributions offer valuable insight into topics that have recently received increased scholarly attention, including the use of opiates and the role of advertising in driving medical markets. The contributors, both established and emerging scholars in the field,...

The actions of the radical left in Punjab in pre-Independence India during the 1920s and 30s have often been viewed as foreign and quintessentially un-Indian due to their widely vilified opposition to the Quit India campaign. This book examines some of these deterministic misapprehensions and establishes that, in fact, Punjabi communism was inextricably woven in to the local culture and traditions of the region. By focusing on the political history of the organised left, a considerable and growing force in South Asia, it discusses the formation and activities of radical groups in colonial...

A critical examination of post-colonial Indian history-writing.

In the years preceding formal Independence from British colonial rule, Indians found themselves responding to the panorama of sin and suffering that constituted the modern present in a variety of imaginative ways. This book is a critical analysis of the uses made of India's often millennial past by nationalist ideologues who sought a specific solution to India's predicament on its way to becoming a post-colonial state. From independence to the present, it considers the competing visions of India's liberation...

This book examines the role western-education and social standing played in the development of Indian nationalism in the early twentieth century. It highlights the influences that education abroad had on a significant proportion of the Indian population. A large number of Indian students - including key figures such as Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, Mohammad Ali Jinnah and Jawaharlal Nehru - took up prominent positions in government service, industry or political movements after having spent their student years in Britain before the Second World War. Having reaped the benefits of the British...

This book presents an innovative investigation of the policies of the Indian Congress during the late colonial period. Departing from the existing historiography of Indian nationalism, it analyses the extent to which Congress elites engaged in processes intended to foster nation-building in India. Rejecting the long-standing premise that the Congress primarily sought to generate a national identity, the author hypothesizes that Congress elites knowingly grappled with the creation of a national governmentality. He argues that they distanced themselves from lethargic nation-building...

The Naxalbari movement marks a significant moment in the postcolonial history of India. Beginning as an armed peasant uprising in 1967 under the leadership of radical communists, the movement was inspired by the Marxist-Leninist theory of revolution and involved a significant section of the contemporary youth from diverse social strata with a vision of people's revolution. It inspired similar radical movements in other South Asian countries such as Nepal.

Arguing that the history and memory of the Naxalbari movement is fraught with varied gendered experiences of political...

The Great Rebellion of 1857 in India was much more than a 'sepoy mutiny'. It was a major event in South Asian and British colonial history that significantly challenged imperialism in India.

This fascinating collection explores hitherto ignored diversities of the Great Rebellion such as gender and colonial fiction, courtesans, white 'marginals', penal laws and colonial anxieties about the Mughals, even in exile. Also studied are popular struggles involving tribals and outcastes, and the way outcastes in the south of India locate the Rebellion. Interdisciplinary in focus and...

Offering a fresh approach to the issue of government and administrative corruption through 'everyday' citizen interactions with the state, this book explores changing discourses and practices of corruption in late colonial and early independent Uttar Pradesh, India. The author moves away from assumptions that the state can primarily be associated with the top levels of government, and looks at citizens' approaches to local level bureaucracies and police. The central argument of the book is that deeply 'institutionalised' corruption in India could only have come about through the exercise...