Routledge
Revolutionary Lives in South Asia: Acts and Afterlives of Anticolonial Political Action
Key Metrics
- Kama MacLean
- Routledge
- Hardcover
- 9781138794979
- 9.8 X 6.8 X 0.6 inches
- 0.9 pounds
- Social Science > Ethnic Studies - American - Asian American Studies
- English
Secure TransactionBook Description
The term 'revolutionary' is used liberally in histories of Indian anticolonialism, but scarcely defined. Implicitly understood, it functions as a signpost or a badge, generously conferred in hagiographies, loosely invoked in historiography, and strategically deployed in contemporary political contests. It is timely, then, to ask the question: Who counts as a 'revolutionary' in South Asia? How can we read 'the revolutionary' in Indian political formations? And what does it really mean to be 'revolutionary' in turbulent late colonial times? This volume takes a biographical approach to the question, by examining the life stories of a series of activists, some well known, who all defined themselves in explicitly revolutionary terms in the early twentieth century: V. D. Savarkar, M. N. Roy, Bhagat Singh, J.P. Narayan and Hansraj Vohra. The authors interrogate the subversive lives of these figures, tracing their polyglot influences and transnational impacts, to map out the discursive travels of 'the revolutionary' in Indian historical and literary worlds from the early 1900s, and to indicate its reverberations in the politics of the present.
This book was previously published as a special issue of Postcolonial Studies.
Author Bio
Dr Kama Maclean is Associate Professor of South Asian and World History in the School of Humanities (FASS) and editor of South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, published by the South Asian Studies Association of Australia.
Kama's first book, Pilgrimage and Power: the Kumbh Mela in Allahabad, was published in New York by Oxford University Press in 2008, and was awarded an Honorable Mention in the Kentish Anand Coomaraswamy Prize, by the Association of Asian Studies in the USA.
In 2009, Kama took up a one year appointment as Professorial Research Fellow at the United Arab Emirates University in Al Ain, where she began to research and write about anticolonial activism in interwar India, a project which focuses largely on the ways in which the actions of what the British called 'the violence movement' impacted on the broader nationalist movement. She has written several articles on this topic and her book, A Revolutionary History of Interwar India: Violence, Image, Voice and Text was published by Hurst & Co (London) and Oxford University Press (New York), 2015 and Penguin (New Delhi, 2016).
In 2012, Kama was awarded an ARC Discovery Grant to complete a project on the extent and impact of social and political relationships between Indians and Australians in the early twentieth century.
Source: University of New South Wales
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