Modern Indian History

Time in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children is characterized by a cacophony of representational forms that the narrator Saleem uses with and against each other, such as cyclical time, timelessness, and revisionary linear historical time. Existing analyses of the novel’s representations of time have generally concluded that one or another of the competing temporal frameworks in the novel is primary and that Rushdie and Saleem ultimately discard or subordinate the others. On the contrary, the novel denies a single coherent temporal structure and instead focuses on productively engaging the diversity of time in keeping with Paul Ricoeur’s theory of aporetic time. Ricoeur theorizes that every framework of representing time includes aporias, blind spots it can’t satisfactorily address, and he argues that we must explore these tensions in representations of time — a task for which narrative is uniquely helpful. Investigating aporetic time in Midnight’s Children develops our understanding of Ricoeur by providing a representation of aporetic time to supplement and challenge Ricoeur’s theoretical model (and Homi K. Bhabha’s thoughts on narrating the nation). Midnight’s Children’s narratorial ambivalence and multivalence with regard to temporal frameworks is closely tied to the novel’s major thematic concerns: constructing an understanding of oneself, one’s nation, and history in the face of conflicting experiences and imperfect narratives of significant and traumatic personal and historical events. Applying Rushdie and Ricoeur to each other productively develops our understanding of how complex, contradictory narrative representations of time and of identities can provide a way forward for individuals and nations between the twin dangers of tyrannical narrative orthodoxy and impotent relativism.

The South American nation of Suriname features a situation of multiple language contact in which speakers use various languages in changing constellations, and often simultaneously. Sarnami (Surinamese Hindustani) shows traces of koineization of various Indian languages, and the effects of multilingualism involving Sranan Tongo and Dutch, the two dominant languages of Suriname. Sarnami has undergone substantial contact-induced change in its lexicon and grammar, including the rise of SVO alongside the inherited SOV basic word order. We conclude that the ever growing influence of Sranan Tongo and Dutch may lead to more extensive restructuring with similar outcomes as “creolization”. Traditional labels are therefore not always adequate beyond the realm of the canonical creoles involving European lexifiers and (West) African substrate languages.

An analysis is presented of a month-long Vedic ritual performance undertaken in 1992 by holy man Ranganath Selukar Maharaj in rural Maharashtra, examining its ritual structure, the rhetoric of religious reform and national welfare (including the influence of Arya Samaj doctrine, Hindu nationalism, and Marathi Vaishnava bhakti on him), and the appeal made by both the ritual's organizers and its opponents to the authority of science and "modern rationalism." The analysis of the event's ritual structure introduces the concept of "spectacle," which is defined as a form of public, ceremonial action that frames the ritual actions and thus endows these fixed, "classical" elements with a local and contemporary significance. The spectacle, besides arousing public interest, makes explicit the ideology implied in the present ritual performance and dramatizes the social alignments between the ritual agents and the other participants.

"""This is the first analysis of Gandhi’s dressing style in terms of communication theory and an exploration of the subliminal messages that were subtly communicated to large audience. Peter Gonsalves chooses three famous theorists from the field of communication studies and looks at Gandhi through the lens of each one, to ...give us a fascinating and new insight into one of the most famous men from South Asia.

The author first prepares the ground for the theoretical investigation by exploring the breadth of Gandhi’s communication skills. He provides essential information on a wide range of Gandhi’s communication skills, with a view to proposing interesting areas of research for communication scholars.
The book deals with the qualitative and quantitative aspects of Gandhi’s verbal output, his linguistic capacity, his journalistic and letter-writing style, his peace communication in an atmosphere of conflict, his organizational ability and the international repercussions of his mass mediated messages. It also elaborates the different types of non-verbal communication he used, such as silence, fasting, clothing, personal presence and charisma.

The book closes with, perhaps for the first time, a Gandhian approach to symbolisation for socio-political change.Photographs of Gandhi in different phases of his life have been used to provide a visual chronology of sartorial change and emphasise the arguments in the book."""

"""This pioneering research offers a sweeping new interpretation of the complex and seemingly contradictory nature of Indian democracy and polity. In contrast to much of existing scholarship, it joins the colonial and postcolonial periods in Indian history into a seamless narrative. "India in the Shadows of Empire" explains the postcolonial Indian polity by presenting an alternative historical narrative of the British Empire in India and India's struggle for independence. It pursues this narrative along two major trajectories. On the one hand, it focuses on the role of imperial judicial institutions and practices in the making of both the British Empire and the anti-colonial movement under the Congress, with the lawyer as political leader. On the other hand, it offers a novel interpretation of Gandhi's non-violent resistance movement as being different from the Congress. It shows that the Gandhian movement, as the most powerful force largely responsible for India's independence, was anchored not in western discourses of political and legislative freedom but rather in Indic traditions of renunciative freedom, with the renouncer as leader. This volume offers a comprehensive and new reinterpretation of the Indian Constitution in the light of this historical narrative. "India in the Shadows of Empire" contends that the British colonial idea of justice and the Gandhian ethos of resistance have been the two competing and conflicting driving forces that have determined the nature and evolution of the Indian polity after independence.

Ambitious, original, and thought-provoking, this book will be indispensable for students and scholars of Indian history, the British Empire, legal-constitutional history, political science, and sociology. It will also interest anybody seeking a broad understanding of the mainsprings of modern Indian history and politics.

Review: "This is a truly original and path-breaking book in more ways than one can list. It provides an innovative history of the construction of the idea of justice and its institutional locations in modern India...It presents a refreshingly original reading of the relationship between discourses of law, justice, and sovereignty. In doing so it opens up a veritable new research agenda on the relationship between power and politics in Indian history. The book contains a wealth of new archival material. But it also brings freshness to familiar material. The book is unfailingly stimulating and will transform your thinking about how power is legitimized and contested."--Pratap Bhanu Mehta, President, Center for Policy Research, New Delhi """