Historiography and writing postcolonial India

Jabbar, Naheem:
Historiography and writing postcolonial India / Naheem Jabbar. - London : Routledge, 2009. - x, 244 S. - (Routledge studies in South Asian history ; 3)
ISBN 978-0-415-48847-1 / 0-415-48847-8
£ 80.00

Beschreibung
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 from her apocalyptical present to be found in the thinking of Gandhi, V. D. Savarkar, Nehru and B. R. Ambedkar as well as V. S. Naipaul and Salman Rushdie. It examines some of the archetypal elements in historical consciousness that find their echo in often brutal unhistorical ways in everyday life. [Verlagsinformation]

Inhalt
Preface. ix
Acknowledgments. xi
PART 1: RE-THINKING INDIAN HISTORIES. 1
1. Historiography and narrative. 3
    Introduction. 3
    Interpretive modes: modem and postmodern. 19
2. The historical sense. 49
    Introduction. 49
    History and the myth of science. 50
    History as knowledge and sense. 64
3. Hindutva and writing postcolonial India. 84
    Introduction. 84
    Interpretive modes. 106
    A nation is born. 115
    The concept of Hindutva as the primitive sublime. 122
    The concept of Hindutva and history. 125
4. B. R. Ambedkar and the Hindu past. 133
    Introduction. 133
    Improvingthe apocalyptic present. 139
    Dissolving the Hindu past. 144
PART 2 RE-IMAGINING INDIAN PASTS. 157
5. V. S. Naipaul's'India': history and the myth of antiquity. 159
    Introduction. 159
    Figuring a history of the present. 162
    India as multitude. 165
    History and the myth of purity in antiquity. 173
6. Salman Rushdie and the agon of the past. 180
    Introduction. 180
    The tragic form and its discontents. 184
    History as the tragic form. 196
Conclusion. 201
Notes. 207
References. 230
Index. 241

Autor
NAHEEM JABBAR is Honorary Research Fellow in the School of Social Sciences at the University of Birmingham, UK. His current research interest explores the vital 'pre-political' role religious consciousness plays as a mode of resistance for subordinated groups.

Quellen: Routledge; Amazon; WorldCat.