An Essay On India Routledge Revivals

First published in 1931, Robert Byron’s Essay on India evaluates the state of colonial rule in India and analyses the contemporary problems facing the country. Based upon Byron’s travelling experiences within India in 1929 as a correspondent for the Daily Express, the work explores political factors more fully than in Byron's earlier writings, evaluating the successes and failures of British colonialism in the region.

First published in 2001, this book sets out to shed light on traditional controversies in Mill scholarship, underscore the significance of the contribution Mill made to associationist psychology, argue he is not entirely successful in explaining why art matters, and that this failure is linked to a deep tension in his mature work — rooted in his unwillingness to shake off the moral psychology he was raised on. The book examines various episodes and tensions in Mill’s life and work and how they relate to and informed his philosophy — while also giving a critical account of it. This book will be of interest to students of philosophy.

This title, first published in 1990, provides a close contextual analysis of how influential Indian policy-makers have perceived India's interests within the ASEAN region since Indian independence in 1947. Placing these perceptions in the context of India's broad strategic and foreign policy framework, Ayoob analyses the policies which had emerged by the close of the 1980s and stresses the close link between the futures of the two regions. Including a thorough analysis of superpower involvement, as well as Indian relations with Indonesia, Vietnam and Cambodia, this is a comprehensive study of great value to students with an interest in Indian and Southeast Asian history and diplomacy.

Events in the Indian sub-continent during the 1970s, where, in the summer of 1975, the ruling party engineered a ‘constitutional’ coup by declaring a national emergency, re-emphasised the need for a fuller understanding of India’s social system and people. First published the following year, in 1976, Inside India Today attempted to fulfil that need. Drawing on personal interviews, conducted during his two years’ travels throughout the country collecting a mass of first hand evidence, and on various surveys and studies published in the press, the author sketches a broad portrait of Indian life in the villages and cities. Hiro relates this research to the existing socio-political structure of the time: the constitutional framework, the electoral system, the performance of the Indian National Congress and the Communist system. Written in an accessible, engaging style and containing a wealth of information and insight, Inside India Today is a major contribution towards the scholarship surrounding this complex and fascinating country.

First published in 1986, this book sets Kipling firmly in the historical context not only of contemporary India but of prior Anglo-Indian writers about India. Despite his enthusiastic reception in England as ‘revealer of the East’, in India he seems to have been regarded as just one more Anglo-Indian writer. The author demonstrates the traditionalism of Kipling’s use of the themes of Anglo-Indian fiction – themes such as the ‘White Man’s grave’, domestic instability, frustration and loneliness. In particular, Kipling is shown to be writing in a strongly conservative idiom, concentrating on the role of the British hierarchy as the determining factor in a response to India, on British insecurity and fears of a repeat of the 1857 mutiny, and regarding Indian institutions only in so far as they represented a threat to British rule. Conservative critiques of liberalism are also discussed.

India is the second largest country in the world with regard to population, the world’s largest democracy and by far the largest country in South Asia, and one of the most diverse and pluralistic nations in the world in terms of official languages, cultures, religions and social identities. Indians have for centuries exchanged ideas with other cultures globally and some traditions have been transformed in those transnational and transcultural encounters and become successful innovations with an extraordinary global popularity. India is an emerging global power in terms of economy, but in spite of India’s impressive economic growth over the last decades, some of the most serious problems of Indian society such as poverty, repression of women, inequality both in terms of living conditions and of opportunities such as access to education, employment, and the economic resources of the state persist and do not seem to go away. This Handbook contains chapters by the field’s foremost scholars dealing with fundamental issues in India’s current cultural and social transformation and concentrates on India as it emerged after the economic reforms and the new economic policy of the 1980s and 1990s and as it develops in the twenty-first century. Following an introduction by the editor, the book is divided into five parts: Part I: Foundation Part II: India and the world Part III: Society, class, caste and gender Part IV: Religion and diversity Part V: Cultural change and innovations Exploring the cultural changes and innovations relating a number of contexts in contemporary India, this Handbook is essential reading for students and scholars interested in Indian and South Asian culture, politics and society.

First published in 1976, this Routledge Revivals reissue presents an analysis of the Swat Pathans, the people of the North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan, who belong administratively to Pakistan despite being a fiercely independent group, with their own codes and ways of life. Akbar S. Ahmed, who knows the Swat Pathans well through his family connections, presents a clear and sophisticated analysis of their complex society. The study provides an anthropological and critical re-examination of the ethnography of the Swat Pathans and the author suggests specific alternative models of social organization. The book also represents an important contribution to the general debate in the social sciences between the ‘methodological individualists’ and the ‘methodological holists’, and challenges some of the theoretical and methodological premises in anthropology. In particular the author is critical of Professor Fredrik Barth’s study of Swat Pathans, for he believes that the ‘Swat models’ have inadvertently become the basis for generalized, and often incorrect, understanding of models of Pathan socio-political organization in the social sciences.

First published in 1909, the purpose of this book was to draw attention to the political, social and religious changes that were taking place in India and detail how this should inform British colonial policy. The author argues that the political situation demanded decisive action as several factors had caused increasing difficulties in administration: waning enthusiasm on the part of English officials, greater tension between the governors and the governed -- often caused by colonial arrogance which had been brought into sharper relief by spread of education and the growth of patriotic feeling. He also argues that the crux of India's economic difficulties was the poverty of its people and asserts that the solution to both problems was the 'sympathetic and systematic encouragement of her legitimate aspirations and patriotic tendencies'. In regard to the social and religious changes, the author observes that the changes are not less considerable and advises that the government should, as far as was possible, maintain the existing basis by a policy of 'wise conservation'. This book will be of interest to students of Indian history and colonialism.