HI297: Twentieth Century India: Colonialism,

Democracy and Protest

LECTURE AND SEMINAR SCHEDULE:

Term 1: Themes and Trajectories

Week 1:

Week 2: Introductory Session

Week 3: Colonialism and its Legacies

Seminar Readings:

1. Anil Seal, “Imperialism and Nationalism in India”,

Modern Asian Studies, 1973

2. Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments

(chapter on the colonial state)

Background Readings:

1. Sekhar Bandyopadhyay, From Plassey To Partition

2. Sumit Sarkar, Modern India: 1885-1947, chapter 1.

3. Indivar Kamtekar, “A Different War Dance: State

and Class in India 1939-1945” (Past and Present,

2002)

4. Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal, Modern South Asia

5. Peter Robb, A History of India

Week 4: Indian Democracy, 1947-77

Seminar Readings:

1. Benjamin Zachariah, Nehru (‘Interlude: Envisioning

the New India’)

2. Sudipta Kaviraj, “The Passive Revolution and India:

A Critique” (from The Trajectories of the Indian

State)

Background Readings:

1. Ramachandra Guha, India after Gandhi

2. Ayesha Jalal, Democracy and Authoritarianism in

South Asia

3. Francine Frankel, India’s Political Economy 1947-

2004

Week 5: Indian Democracy, 1977 –

Seminar Readings:

1. Sudipta Kaviraj, “The Passive Revolution and India:

A Critique” (from The Trajectories of the Indian

State)

2. Sudipta Kaviraj, “The Politics of Liberalization in

India” (from The Trajectories of the Indian State)

3. Nivedita Menon and Aditya Nigam: Power and

Contestation: India since 1989 (Introduction)

Background Readings:

1. Ramachandra Guha, India After Gandhi

2. Ayesha Jalal, Democracy and Authoritarianism in

South Asia

3. Siddhartha Deb, The Beautiful and the Damned

4. Pankaj Mishra, Butter Chicken in Ludhiana

5. Achin Vanaik, The Painful Transition: Bourgeois

Democracy in India

Reading Week

Week 7: Gandhian Movements and Indian Politics

Seminar Readings:

1. Shahid Amin, “Gandhi As Mahatma” (Subaltern

Studies II)

2. Eugene F. Irschick: “Gandhian Non-Violent Protest:

Rituals of Avoidance or Rituals of Confrontation?”

(Economic and Political Weekly, 1986)

3. JP Narayan, “Gandhi, Vinoba and the Bhoodan

Movement”

4. Sumanta Banerjee, “Anna Hazare, Civil Society and

the State” (Economic and Political Weekly, 2011)

Background Readings:

1. Sumit Sarkar, Modern India 1885-1947

2. Partha Chatterjee, “Gandhi and the Critique of Civil

Society”

3. Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the

Colonial World

4. Ramachandra Guha, Gandhi Before India

5. Faisal Devji, The Impossible Indian: Gandhi and

the Temptation of Violence

6. Kathryn Tidrick, Gandhi: A Political and Spiritual

Life

7. Bhiku Parekh, Gandhi: A Very Short Introduction

8. Norman Finkelstein, What Gandhi Says

9. Judith Brown, “The Mahatma and Modern India”

10. Harold Coward (ed.) Indian Critiques of

Gandhi

11. Arundhati Roy, “The Doctor and the Saint”,

available online, Outlook magazine.

12. David Hardiman: Gandhi in his time and ours

13. David Arnold: Gandhi

14. Claude Markovits: The Un-Gandhian Gandhi

Week 8: The Long Rise of the Hindu Right

Seminar Readings:

1. P.K. Datta: “Dying Hindus: The Production of

Communal Commonsense in Early 20th Century

Bengal” (EPW, 1993)

2. Chetan Bhatt, Hindu Nationalism, chapters 5 and 6

Background Readings:

1. Gyanendra Pandey, “Rallying around the Cow”

2. Thomas Blom Hansen, The Saffron Wave

3. Christophe Jaffrelot, Hindu Nationalism: A Reader

4. Basu et al, Khaki Shorts, Saffron Flags

5. B.D. Graham, The Hindu Nationalist Movement

and Indian Politics

6. Communal Riots in India: A Chronology (1947-

2003)

Week 9: The Indian Left

Seminar Readings:

1. Stephen Sherlock: “Berlin, Moscow and Bombay:

The Marxism That India Inherited” (South Asia,

1998)

2. Manali Desai, State Formation and Radical Politics

in India, chapter 6

3. Sudeep Chakrabarti, Red Sun: Travels in Naxalite

Country, Introduction

4. Arundhati Roy, “Walking with the Comrades”

Background Readings:

1. Sumit Sarkar, Modern India 1885-1947

2. Partha Chatterjee, The Present Politics of West

Bengal

3. Nivedita Menon and Aditya Nigam, ‘Old Left, New

Left’ (in Power and Contestation: India Since 1989)

4. Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, “From neighbourhood to

nation: the rise and fall of the Left in Bombay’s

Girangaon in the twentieth century” (in History,

Culture and the Indian City)

Week 10: Dalit Movements and Caste Politics

Seminar Readings:

1. Gerard Baader: “The Depressed Classes in India:

Their Struggle for Emancipation” (Studies: An Irish

Quarterly Review, 1937)

2. Christophe Jaffrelot: “Sanskritization v.

Ethnicization in India: Changing Identities and

Caste Politics Before Mandal” (Asian Survey, 2000)

3. Nivedita Menon and Aditya Nigam, “The

Recalcitrance of Caste” (from Power and

Contestation: India Since 1989)

4. Gail Omvedt, Understanding Caste (pp.48-97 :

chapters 7-12)

Background Readings:

1. Christophe Jaffrelot, The Silent Revolution

2. B.R. Ambedkar, The Annihilation of Caste

3. Arundhati Roy, ‘Introduction’ to The Annihilation

of Caste

4. Sekhar Bandyopadhyay, “Transfer of Power and the

Crisis of Dalit Politics in India, 1945-47”

5. Omprakash Valmiki, Joothan. A Dalit’s Life

6. Vasant Moon, Growing up Untouchable in India. A

Dalit Autobiography

Term 2: Key Texts and Arguments

In term 2, the emphasis will shift to political arguments

and texts: there will be fewer readings but more intense

engagement with individual texts.

Week 11: Gandhi, Hind Swaraj

Week 12: Gandhi, Hind Swaraj and miscellaneous other

writings

Week 13: Savarkar, Hindutva

Week 14: Savarkar, Hindutva

Week 15: Ambedkar, The Annihilation of Caste

Reading Week

Week 16: Ambedkar, The Annihilation of Caste

Week 17: Communist Memoirs and Testimonies

(readings TBA)

Week 18: Communist Memoirs and Testimonies

Week 19: Contemporary Movements (tbc)

Week 20: Contemporary Movements (tbc)

Week 21: Film Screening and discussion

Week 22: Film Screening and discussion

Revision Session (tbc)

Readings

Selected Basic Texts:

1. Ramachandra Guha, India after Gandhi

2. Francine Frankel, India’s Political Economy 1947-

2004

3. Sumit Sarkar, Modern India 1885-1947

4. Sumit Sarkar, Modern Times

5. Sekhar Bandyopadhyay, From Plassey to Partition

6. Peter Robb, A History of India

7. Burton Stein, A History of India

8. Achin Vanaik, The Painful Transition: Bourgeois

Democracy in India

9. Sudipta Kaviraj, The Trajectories of the Indian State

10. Partha Chatterjee, The Politics of the Governed

11. Nivedita Menon and Aditya Nigam, Power and

Contestation: India since 1989

12. Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal, Modern South

Asia

13. Benjamin Zachariah, Nehru

14. Benjamin Zachariah, Developing India

15. Vivek Chibber, Locked in Place: State-Building

and Late Industrialization in India

16. Thomas and Barbara Metcalf, A Concise

History of Modern India

17. Stuart Corbridge et al, Seeing The State:

Governance and Governmentality in India

18. Siddhartha Deb, The Beautiful and the

Damned

19. Pankaj Mishra, Butter Chicken in Ludhiana

20. C.A. Bayly, Indian Society and the Making of

the British Empire

21. K. Balagopal, Ear to the Ground: Selected

Writings on Class and Caste

(The most important reference texts for the course are

highlighted above)

Primary Resources:

1. Times of India – you can access the full run of this

newspaper from the 1830s to the present through the

library’s online resources. It’s invaluable for

researchers, and will be very helpful as a supplement

to your readings, and to deepen your knowledge of the

field.

2. British Parliamentary Papers – also online through the

library’s database collection

3. Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, available

online

4. Collected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru, available online

5. Youtube resources: Indian internet resources are

usually less than reliable – there’s a great deal of

bigotry and hate speech masquerading as historical

knowledge. Nevertheless, there are some invaluable

resources. On Youtube’s British Pathe channel, you

can find thousands of videos about modern Indian

history, of variable lengths – great footage.

Journals:

Since much of the period under discussion in the

module is unevenly covered by available monographs,

academic and non-academic journals and magazines

furnish some of the more reliable accounts available. All

of these are either in the public domain or available

through the library’s online resources.

Academic Journals:

Economic and Political Weekly

Indian Economic and Social History Review

Modern Asian Studies

Comparative Studies in South Asia, Africa and the

Middle East

Comparative Studies in Society and History

Indian Historical Review

South Asia

Journal of Peasant Studies

Past and Present

“Non-Academic” Journals and Magazines:

Caravan magazine

Outlook magazine

Seminar

Tehelka

The Hindu (newspaper, available online)

The Guardian (very occasional coverage, but check out

the writings of Priyamvada Gopal and Pankaj Mishra on

the website)

Essays

Essay Questions:

1. How did political conflicts in the late-colonial era

mark the politics of the post-Independence period?

2. What was the ‘Congress system’ in Indian politics?

How and why did it enter into crisis?

3. Why was Gandhi able to mobilize mass support

among the Indian peasantry?

4. What was ‘Nehruvian socialism’?

5. Why was socialism such a widely shared point of

reference in post-Independence politics, and how

have matters changed in this regard?

6. Discuss the concept of ‘passive revolution’, with

reference to the post-colonial Indian state.

7. Why was Emergency declared in 1975?

8. Discuss the major shifts in the history of Indian

Communism up till Independence.

9. How did economic liberalization transform Indian

politics?

10. Why did the Hindu Right grow so rapidly from

the 1980s onward?

11. Discuss the case for Indian freedom laid out in

Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj.

12. What were the distinctive features of Gandhi’s

conception of Swaraj?

13. Discuss the main features of Ambedkar’s

critique of the caste system, as laid out in his

Annihilation of Caste.

14. Was Gandhi a nationalist?

15. On what basis did Savarkar make the case for

India as a Hindu nation?

16. What impact did the destruction of the Babri

Masjid have upon Indian democracy?

17. Discuss the main shifts in Dalit politics since

Independence.

18. Explore the way in which political motifs are

formulated in any one of the following films: 1.

Gandhi, 2. Rang de Basanti , 3. Shri 420, 4. Mother

India, 5. Hazaaron Khwaishen Aisi 6.

Kathapurushan

19. Discuss the main tensions within the Indian

Left after Independence, and analyse their

consequences.

20. How did Savarkar, Ambedkar and Gandhi’s

political visions differ?

21. Did Indian politics change fundamentally after

the Emergency?

22. Did colonialism fracture or integrate Indian

society and politics?