Author: Bidyut Chakrabarty
Editor(s): Bidyut Chakrabarty
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Year: 2005
Language: English
Pages: 327
ISBN/UPC (if available): 0195673417
Description
Communal identity is a matter of serious debate and discussion in contemporary India. This collection acquaints the reader with issues that are central to the discourse on the construction of identity and its manifestations in reality, presenting key extracts form an increasingly urgent historiographical debate.
The essays explore both the circumstances and the forms in which identity, communal identity in particular, is recast in a transitional postcolonial society like India. Employing a two-pronged approach, they take into account theoretical inputs as well as historical circumstances that have moulded aspects of the debate.
With a useful introductory survey and a comprehensive bibliography, this volume will be invaluable to postgraduate students and scholars of contemporary Indian history, sociology, and politics, as well as informed general readers, interested in the topical issue of identity politics in modern India.
REVIEWS:
Professor Bidyut Chakrabarty has put together some of the most admirable essays on the question of the formation of the communal identity in this Reader.
-The Book Review
The thirteen essays in this book seek to posit communalism not only in the perspective of contemporary India but also in the global context.
-The Telegraph
Contents
GENERAL EDITORS’ PREFACE
EDITOR’S PREFACE TO THE PAPERBACK EDITION
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
INTRODUCTION
Some Definitive Texts
Extracts from The Collected Works to Mahatma Gandhi
Presidential Address of M A Jinnah, Lahore, March 1940
Excerpts from Hindutva
Particulararistic and Universalistic Identity
Fluidity or Compartments: Hindus, Muslims, and Partition
Discourses on National Identity
Race, Caste, and Ethnic Identity
Ethno-Linguistic Issues in the Indian Federal Context
Politics of Diversity: Religious Communities and Multiple Partition
Community Formation and Communal Conflict: Namasudra-Muslim Riot in Jessore-Khulna
Identity Politics of the Marginals
Insiders and Outsiders in India: Primordial Collectivism and Cultural Pluralism in Nation-building
Hinduism as Delhi Rule: Periyar and the National Question
Jat Sikhs-A Question of Identity
Fluid Boundaries: Christian Communities in India
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS