Greater India And The Indian Expansionist Imagination C 1885 1965

This book is the first systematic study of the genealogy, discursive structures, and political implications of the concept of ‘Greater India’, implying a Hindu colonization of Southeast Asia, and used by extension to argue for a past Indian greatness as a colonial power, reproducible in the present and future. From the 1880s to the 1960s, protagonists of the Greater India theme attempted to make a case for the importance of an expansionist Indian civilisation in civilizing Southeast Asia. The argument was extended to include Central Asia, Africa, North and South America, and other regions where Indian migrants were to be found. The advocates of this Indocentric and Hindu revivalist approach, with Hindu and Indian often taken to be synonymous, were involved in a quintessentially parochial project, despite its apparently international dimensions: to justify an Indian expansionist imagination that viewed India’s past as a colonizer and civilizer of other lands as a model for the restoration of that past greatness in the future. Zabarskaite shows that the crucial ideologues and elements used for the formation of the construct of Greater India can be traced to the svadeśī movement of the turn of the century, and that Greater India moved easily between the domains of the scholarly and the popular as it sought to establish itself as a form of nationalist self-assertion.

This volume examines the tension between the “nation” idea as a necessary language of legitimacy with which to claim liberation, and its role in disciplining people and their identities in India, in the name of national liberation. It is an attempt to open up new lines of thinking, and ways of reading Indian history.

Inhalt: - Gautam Liu: Premchands Hindi: Zur Genese des Standardregisters in der gegenwärtigen Hindi-Prosa - Akanksha Yadav, Vinita Chandra: Conditional Vows: Exchange and Reciprocity between the Deity and Laity in Chaṭh - Arian Hopf: Das Rāmāʾin in der Urdu-Literatur - Benjamin Zachariah: Syed Mujtaba Ali's Unpainted Canvas: The Chacha Stories and a Bengali View of Weimar Germany, c. 1929–1932 - Bipasha Bhattacharya: Two Books on Visva-Bharati - Shruti Krishna Bhat: A Path of Liberation that Fetches Prosperity: Juxtaposing the Śākta View of bhukti-mukti and the Philosophy of Action-Liberation

Traces the story of India's expansion that is woven into the culture of Southeast Asia.

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This series seeks to focus on the politics inherent in historical thinking, professional and non-professional, promoted by states, political organisations, 'nationalities' or interest groups, and to explore the links between political (re-)education, historiography and mobilisation or identity formation.

When thinking of India, it is hard not to think of caste. In academic and common parlance alike, caste has become a central symbol for India, marking it as fundamentally different from other places while expressing its essence. Nicholas Dirks argues that caste is, in fact, neither an unchanged survival of ancient India nor a single system that reflects a core cultural value. Rather than a basic expression of Indian tradition, caste is a modern phenomenon--the product of a concrete historical encounter between India and British colonial rule. Dirks does not contend that caste was invented by the British. But under British domination caste did become a single term capable of naming and above all subsuming India's diverse forms of social identity and organization. Dirks traces the career of caste from the medieval kingdoms of southern India to the textual traces of early colonial archives; from the commentaries of an eighteenth-century Jesuit to the enumerative obsessions of the late-nineteenth-century census; from the ethnographic writings of colonial administrators to those of twentieth-century Indian scholars seeking to rescue ethnography from its colonial legacy. The book also surveys the rise of caste politics in the twentieth century, focusing in particular on the emergence of caste-based movements that have threatened nationalist consensus. Castes of Mind is an ambitious book, written by an accomplished scholar with a rare mastery of centuries of Indian history and anthropology. It uses the idea of caste as the basis for a magisterial history of modern India. And in making a powerful case that the colonial past continues to haunt the Indian present, it makes an important contribution to current postcolonial theory and scholarship on contemporary Indian politics.

The first reference work to provide an integrated and authoritative body of information about the political, cultural and economic contexts of postcolonial literatures that have their provenance in the major European Empires of Belgium, Denmark, France, G