Author: Shahid Amin
Publisher: Penguin
Year: 2006
Language: English
Pages: 294
ISBN/UPC (if available): 0143062042
Description
An account of the momentous event in modern Indian history which made Mahatma Gandhi suspend the non-cooperation movement.
On 4 February 1922, peasant volunteers who had enlisted in Gandhi's newly launched people's struggle against British rule turned violent and burned down a police station in Chauri Chaura killing twenty-three policemen. According to Shahid Amin, this dramatic occurrence simply had to be quickly forgotten as a stain upon the clean sheets of Gandhian non-violence. And so it was. Chauri Chaura was effectively blotted out of the grand narrative of Indian heroic nationalism, making a token appearance in authoritative textbooks.
In contrast with this, in Event, Metaphor, Memory Amin reveals the fascinating specificities that comprise the history of Chauri Chaura. By combining archival records with local memory to amplify voices of individual peasants, he analyses the way events and memories are given meanings and emphases, and how records are appropriated by different, sometimes conflicting, histories. The result is a book that breaks new ground in several areas of Indian historiography.
Winner of the Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy Book Prize 1997.
REVIEWS
It’s not often that one comes across a piece of solid scholarship that reds like a thriller. I hope future historians will do for our times what Shahid Amin has done for the infamous incident of Chauri Chaura.
-Arundhati Roy
A delightfully presented tour de horizon of the microcosm of Chauri Chaura as well as, by analogy, the macrocosm of nationalist India.
-Biblio
A brilliant path-breaking book…has the engaging quality of first-rate fiction.
-Outlook
A fascinating book.-Free Press Journal
Amin's work shows that history need not necessarily be a barren, archive based exercise…and that history writing is a rich and alive enterprise.-Telegraph
Among the many concerns of Amin's book, the modes and nuances of representation are central…He translates oral records in a way that gives us a sense of the rhythms and transitions of the original speech…and through the voices of his interviewees, brings the time to life.
-Amit Chaudhuri, London Review of Books
Amin's book is one of the first attempts by a historian of India 's freedom movement to break out of the standard conventions of historiography. It builds into its fast-paced narrative the categories of the people who made history, but who did so on the basis of a consciousness that can only be called a historical.
-Ashis Nandy
Shahid Amin's Chauri Chaura is a pioneering study of how a violent and politically transgressive episode is transformed by local memory. The flames, bullets, prison sentences, and executions that divided the villagers in the 1920s here bring them together as survivors, and heirs give their account to the historian. And it is a riveting story, one that makes us think anew about the creation of Indian nationalism and the historian's responsibility to his sources.
-Natalie Zemon Davis
The strength of Amin's endeavour lies in the fact that even by the more traditional parameters of historiography, his book remains instructive…he does it with style, returning history to an old narrative tradition.
-The India Magazine
One of the special strengths of this book is its writing, which combines a brisk and lucid prose with density of information that requires slow and careful reading…This beautiful and important book has many rewards to offer the patient reader.- American Ethonologist
The book promises much; it delivers a great deal.
-Journal of the South Asian Studies
This book is a brilliant contribution and is bound to interest students of Indian history.
-Asian Affairs
Works of this kind and quality in the history of modern India are rare…a remarkable book.
-Imperial and Commonwealth History
A complex, multilayered text, whose structure responds forcefully to recent historiographical debates…the multiplicity of methods is the single greatest contribution of this book.
-Chicago South Asia Newsletter
Contents
PREFACE TO THE REVISED EDITION
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
PROLOGUE
PART ONE
Impressions
The Riot and History
A Narrative of the event
PART TWO
Chauri Chaura-Dumri-Mundera
PART THREE
Fraudulent Reports
The Lessons of the Riot
The Crime of Chauri Chaura
Nationalizing the Riot
The Case for Punishment and Justice
Dwarka Gosain’s Complaint
PART FOUR
Violence and Counter-Insurgency
The Making of the Approver
Shikari’s Testimony
The Approver and the Accused
Judicial discourse
The Alimentary Aspects of Picketing
The Politics of the Trial
PART FIVE
Historian’s Dilemma
Dumri Records
The Youthful Account
Komal Dacoit
The Babusaheb of Mundera
The Madanpur Narrative
Malaviya Saves Chotki Dumri
The Great Betrayal
A Powerful Mukhbir
The One-Seven-Two of Chauri Chaura
The Policemen Dead
The Darogain
The Presence of Gandhi
Otiyars
Chutki, or the Gift of Grain
The Feast of 4 February 1922
The Colour Gerua and Proper Nationalist Attire
What the Otiyars Wore
Witness to a History
Towards Conclusion
EPILOGUE
AFTERWORD
APPENDIX A
NOTES
Abbreviations
Notes to Prologue
Notes to Part One
Notes to Part Two
Notes to Part Three
Notes to Part Four
Notes to Part five
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX