Routledge
Writing Revolution in South Asia: History, Practice, Politics
Key Metrics
- Kama MacLean
- Routledge
- Hardcover
- 9780415786683
- 9.8 X 7.1 X 0.6 inches
- 1.1 pounds
- Social Science > Ethnic Studies - General
- English
Secure TransactionBook Description
This comprehensive volume examines the relationship between revolutionary politics and the act of writing in modern South Asia. Its pages feature a diverse cast of characters: rebel poets and anxious legislators, party theoreticians and industrious archivists, nostalgic novelists, enterprising journalists and more. The authors interrogate the multiple forms and effects of revolutionary storytelling in politics and public life, questioning the easy distinction between 'words' and 'deeds' and considering the distinct consequences of writing itself. While acknowledging that the promise, fervour or threat of revolution is never reducible to the written word, this collection explores how manifestos, lyrics, legal documents, hagiographies and other constellations of words and sentences articulate, contest and enact revolutionary political practice in both colonial and post-colonial South Asia.
Emphasising the potential of writing to incite, contain or reorient the present, this volume promises to provoke new conversations at the intersection of historiography, politics and literature in South Asia, urging scholars and activists to interrogate their own storytelling practices and the relationship of the contemporary moment to violent and contested pasts.
This book was originally published as a special issue of South Asia: Journal of South Asian 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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