Kategoria BISAC: History >> Asia - South - General

Based on exclusive interviews with key players and...

Reproductive Restraints traces the history of contraception use and population management in colonial India, while illuminating its connection to contemporary debates in India and birth control movements in Great Britain and the United States. Sanjam Ahluwalia draws attention to the interactive and relational history of Indian birth control by including western activists such as Margaret Sanger and Marie Stopes alongside important Indian campaigners. In revealing the elitist politics of middle-class feminists, Indian nationalists, western activists, colonial authorities and the medical...

"An important book, a major work, that must be read and absorbed by those involved in scholarship, or any critical enterprise." The Independent

How does the Western world represent India? To what extent is knowledge of the people and institutions of the Indian sub-continent based on the West's own desires for world hegemony, and fantasies about its rationality? In this controversial and widely-praised book, Inden argues that the West's major depictions of India as the civilization of caste, villages, spiritualism, and divine kings and as a land dominated by imagination rather...

"This is a readable and high-quality book. It provides more information and insight on the most successful Marxist rebellion in South Asia's history than has previously been found within one set of covers." --David Gellner

The eruption of a violent Maoist insurgency in Nepal in the late 1990s was met with bewilderment even among many who claimed to know the country well. The so-called "people's war" was launched in 1996 by the Communist Party of Nepal to overthrow the political establishment, including the monarchy. Tactics have included killing members of rival parties as well as...

" W]ill be welcomed by students of comparative slavery.... It] makes us reconsider the significance of slavery in the subcontinent." --Edward A. Alpers, UCLA

Despite its pervasive presence in the South Asian past, slavery is largely overlooked in the region's historiography, in part because the forms of bondage in question did not always fit models based on plantation slavery in the Atlantic world. This important volume will contribute to a rethinking of slavery in world history, and even the category of slavery itself. Most slaves in South Asia were not agricultural laborers, but...

"This is a love story based on the author's ongoing affair with an exotic land.... Novak] captures the reader's attention, admiration and sympathy and then describes straightforwardly the external and internal elements of thinking and policy that are detrimental to the country's survival." --Foreign Service Journal

..". personal and well-informed analysis... Another fine addition to the 'Essential Asia Series'." --Asiaweek

"This rich meditation on the land and people but especially the waters of Bangladesh is a masterpiece of journalism." --The Reader's Review

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In Clothing Gandhi's Nation, Lisa Trivedi explores the making of one of modern India's most enduring political symbols, khadi: a homespun, home-woven cloth. The image of Mohandas K. Gandhi clothed simply in a loincloth and plying a spinning wheel is familiar around the world, as is the sight of Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, and other political leaders dressed in "Gandhi caps" and khadi shirts. Less widely understood is how these images associate the wearers with the swadeshi movement--which advocated the exclusive consumption of indigenous goods to establish India's autonomy from Great...

In Service of Emergent India is an evocative insider's account of a crucial period in India's history. It provides an in-depth look at events that changed the way the world perceived India, and a unique view of Indian statecraft. As Minister of External Affairs, Defense, and Finance in the BJP-led governments of 1996 and 1998-2004, Jaswant Singh was the main foreign policy spokesman for the government of Atal Bihari Vajpayee during the 1998 nuclear tests by India and Pakistan, the hijacking to Kandahar, Afghanistan, of Indian Airlines flight IC 814, and the Kargil conflict between India...

In 1857-1858, rebels in northern India recruited tens of thousands of civilian volunteers in a mutiny that threatened to engulf the entire subcontinent. This study explores a fundamental question never explicitly investigated in histories of the mutiny: How could a vastly outnumbered British army, with dangerously extended lines of supply and reinforcement, defeat so large a force on its home ground? Watson addresses the problem by focusing on the Lucknow campaign, which was pivotal to the success of the British, and abandons the usual narrative approach to the subject in favor of an...

This book considers the forces that shaped India's postwar position as a major power. It examines the growth and development of India's defense infrastructure from the eve of the Second World War in 1938 through the transfer of power and partition in 1947 to the creation of the Baghdad Pact in 1955. The study shows how the British invested in the expansion of India's defense infrastructure during the Second World War in order to defend their imperial interests east of Suez. It also examines the effects of partition and de jure independence on India's access to this infrastructure. Finally,...

The interface of identity construction practices and the role of knowledge of the past in that continual process manifests itself in contemporary Hindu-Muslim relations and political governance. Presenting' the Past studies the religious, cultural, sociological, and ideological dimensions of the Hindutva historiographical project going back and forth into the realms of history, myth, socialization, and governance. Taking Ram' and the division of the Indian society into Rambhakts (Ram devotees) and non-Rambhakts as the core, Udayakumar proceeds by reading the closely related set of...

This study describes and analyzes the significant political events that occurred between the fiftieth anniversary of Indian Independence and the coming of the third millennium. It challenges much of the prevailing public image of India based upon the mistaken notion that it is still the country of Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru. Nehru's principle that India should be a secular state has been lost, and it has become a country dominated by Hindu communalism. Mahatma Gandhi's non-violence has been forgotten, and India has built what will soon be the third largest military force in the...

The debate over the underlying causes of the clash between Hindus and Muslims which continues to polarize India is the central concern of this volume. Syed Nesar Ahmad challenges popular viewpoints regarding the Hindu-Muslim conflict by asserting that, although instrinsic differences between the two cultures do exist and this schism has been somewhat fueled by the cultural conditions in colonial India, the emergence and growth of the conflict is primarily the result of social and economic forces, both global and regional, that has caused the initial differences to intensify into cultural...

Germans of various disciplines not only encouraged but actively framed a discourse that gendered India through voyeuristic descriptions of the male and female body. This study challenges the German's claim to an encounter with India projected on a spiritual plane of communion between kindred spirits and shows that such supposedly apolitical encounters are really strategies of domination. German participation in European Expansion can be perceived as collusion with the British imperialist administration inasmuch as it provided the latter with a justification for existing colonial rule and...

This book is a history of British India from 1599 to 1947. It is divided into three parts addressing political history, topical studies, and a collection of four hundred biographies of noteworthy English men and women who played a role in the creation of British India.

As the Elizabethan era approached its end, English life exuded a high sense of energy and optimism that drove men to the ends of the earth. The lure of wealth in the spices of the East Indies correlated well with English naval strengths. In London, the East India Company set the national vision of competition...

Sri Lanka--an island nation located in the Indian Ocean-- has a population of approximately 19 million. Despite its diminuative size, however, Sri Lanka has a long and complex history. The diversity of its people has led to ethnic, religious, and political conflicts that continue to exist. Peebles describes the experiences of the country, from its earliest settlers, to civil war, to its current state, allowing readers to better understand this often misunderstood country.

With an emphasis on the 20th century, chapters discuss the economy, religion, culture, and government of...