Who Is Bharat Mata? On History, Culture and the Idea of India

Who Is Bharat Mata? On History, Culture and the Idea of India
Author: Purushottam Agrawal
Publisher:
Total Pages: 538
Release: 2019-06-10
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9789386702876

An unprecedented and timely collection of writings by and on Jawaharlal Nehru--the man who shaped newly independent India; and the icon whose legacy is the subject of intense and often angry debate today. 'Who is this Bharat Mata, whose victory you wish?' asked Jawaharlal Nehru--a leading light of the Indian freedom movement who would become the country's first prime minister--at a public gathering in 1936. And then he explained: the mountains and rivers, forests and fields were of course dear to everyone, but what counted ultimately were 'the people of India...spread out all over this vast land. Bharat Mata, Mother India, [is] essentially these millions of people, and victory to her [is] victory to these people.' This collection of writings and speeches by and on Nehru shows us the mind--the ideology, born of experience, observation and deep study--behind this democratic and inclusive idea of India. It is a book of particular relevance at a time when 'nationalism' and the slogan 'Bharat Mata ki Jai' are being used to construct a militant and purely emotional idea of India that excludes millions of residents and citizens. 'Who Is Bharat Mata?' contains selections from Nehru's classic books--An Autobiography, Glimpses of World History and The Discovery of India; his speeches, essays and letters from the pre- and post-Independence years; and some of his most revealing interviews. The concluding section of the book comprises reminiscences and assessments of Nehru by his contemporaries--among them, Mahatma Gandhi, Bhagat Singh, Sardar Patel, Maulana Azad, Aruna Asaf Ali, Sheikh Abdullah, Ramdhari Singh Dinkar, Ali Sardar Jafri, Martin Luther King Jr and Atal Bihar Vajpayee. In this carefully put-together anthology--which also carries an illuminating introduction--Nehru emerges as a remarkable man of ideas and action who had an instinctive understanding of India's civilizational spirit, as also a clear commitment to the scientific temper; and as a leader who, despite the compulsions of politics, remained a true democrat. His legacy continues to be extremely relevant--for, in the words of the editor, an understanding of 'Nehru's political and intellectual journey is a pre-condition for India's survival as a democratic polity and as a humane, compassionate society'.

Awakening Bharat Mata

Awakening Bharat Mata
Author: Swapan Dasgupta
Publisher: Penguin Random House India Private Limited
Total Pages: 448
Release: 2019-05-25
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 935305530X

The rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was much more than an ordinary electoral phenomenon: it brought to the fore two contrasting views of nationhood: between those who saw modern India in terms of secular republicanism and on the other hand were those who sought to blend technological modernity with the country's Hindu inheritance. The Right's ascendancy and the debates that accompanied it, anticipated many of the concerns that find reflection today in the United States and Europe. The phenomenon of Hindu nationalism was also a profound intellectual challenge to the loose Left-liberal consensus that had prevailed in India since Jawaharlal Nehru became Prime Minister in 1947. The idea of Hindutva and the political character of the BJP have been closely scrutinised by scholars, and the impulse has been to view India's Right-wing politics as either a variant of fascism or merely a collection of sectarian prejudices. In fact, the inspiration for the Right in India has come from multiple and often contradictory sources, including the influence of individuals such as Sarvarkar, Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, Swami Vivekananda and Sri Aurobindo, not to mention the Arya Samaj movement. This collection is an attempt to showcase the phenomenon of Hindu nationalism in terms of how it perceives itself. Many of the concerns that drive the Indian Right are located in the country's nationalist culture. In trying to locate some of the ideas, attitudes and beliefs that define the Indian Right, Awakening Bharat Mata also seeks to identify the nature of Indian conservatism and identify its similarities and differences with political thought in the West. This book is not about Hindu nationalism in power but as a social and political movement and its aim is to encourage a more informed understanding of an idea that will remain relevant in Indian life far beyond victories and defeats in elections.

The Goddess and the Nation

The Goddess and the Nation
Author: Sumathi Ramaswamy
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 402
Release: 2010-04-09
Genre: History
ISBN: 0822391538

Making the case for a new kind of visual history, The Goddess and the Nation charts the pictorial life and career of Bharat Mata, “Mother India,” the Indian nation imagined as mother/goddess, embodiment of national territory, and unifying symbol for the country’s diverse communities. Soon after Mother India’s emergence in the late nineteenth century, artists, both famous and amateur, began to picture her in various media, incorporating the map of India into her visual persona. The images they produced enabled patriotic men and women in a heterogeneous population to collectively visualize India, affectively identify with it, and even become willing to surrender their lives for it. Filled with illustrations, including 100 in color, The Goddess and the Nation draws on visual studies, gender studies, and the history of cartography to offer a rigorous analysis of Mother India’s appearance in painting, print, poster art, and pictures from the late nineteenth century to the present. By exploring the mutual entanglement of the scientifically mapped image of India and a (Hindu) mother/goddess, Sumathi Ramaswamy reveals Mother India as a figure who relies on the British colonial mapped image of her dominion to distinguish her from the other goddesses of India, and to guarantee her novel status as embodiment, sign, and symbol of national territory. Providing an exemplary critique of ideologies of gender and the science of cartography, Ramaswamy demonstrates that images do not merely reflect history; they actively make it. In The Goddess and the Nation, she teaches us about pictorial ways of learning the form of the nation, of how to live with it—and ultimately to die for it.

‘The Mortal God'

‘The Mortal God'
Author: Milinda Banerjee
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 455
Release: 2018-04-19
Genre: History
ISBN: 110716656X

This work explores how colonial India imagined human and divine figures to battle the nature and locus of sovereignty.

The Idea of India

The Idea of India
Author: Sunil Khilnani
Publisher: Macmillan
Total Pages: 292
Release: 1999-06-04
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780374525910

"In his new introduction, Khilnani addresses these issues in the new perspectives afforded by events of the recent year in India and in the world."--BOOK JACKET.

Ananda Math

Ananda Math
Author: Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay
Publisher: Diamond Pocket Books Pvt Ltd
Total Pages: 149
Release:
Genre:
ISBN: 9350830493

One of the most popular Indian novels of all ages, 'Ananda Math' was translated innumerable times into Indian and English languages. Five editions were published in Bengali and Hindi during the author's lifetime, the first in 1882. The novel has the backdrop of the 18th century famine in Bengal, infamous as "Chhiyattorer Manvantar" (famine of 76th Bengali year, 1276), to narrate the saga of armed uprising of the ascetics and their disciples against the pillaging East India Company rulers. The uprising is historically known as 'Santan Vidroha', the ascetics being the children of Goddess Jagadambe. The saga of 'Ananda Math' is thrilling and best epitomised in the patriotic mass-puller song "Bande Mataram' ('Hail thee, O My Motherland'). The song is still a mantra that stirs imagination of millions of Hindus. The ascetics robbed the tormentors of people — the British rulers and the greedy jamindars — distributed the looted wealth to poverty-stricken people but kept nothing for themselves. Their targets were mostly the Company armoury and supplies. They had a highly organised setup, spread throughout Bengal. It was also India's first battle for freedom, and not the Sipahi Vidroha of 1857.

Padmavat

Padmavat
Author: Purushottama Agravāla
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2018
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9789353040239

The Nation As Mother

The Nation As Mother
Author: SUGATA. BOSE
Publisher: Penguin Enterprise
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2022-04-15
Genre:
ISBN: 9780143455639

AN ESSENTIAL VOLUME TO UNDERSTAND INDIA'S NATIONAL AND CULTURAL LEGACY In The Nation as Mother, an interconnected set of deeply researched and powerfully argued essays and speeches Sugata Bose explores the relationship between nation, reason and religion in Indian political thought and practice. Offering a subtle interpretation of the ways of imagining the nation as mother, the book illuminates different visions of India as a free and flexible federal union that have acquired renewed salience today. Breaking out of the false dichotomy between secular nationalism and religious communalism, the author provides incisive analyses of the political legacies of Tagore and Gandhi, Nehru and Bose, Aurobindo and Jinnah, and a range of other thinkers and leaders of the anti-colonial movement. The essays question assumptions about any necessary contradiction between cosmopolitanism and patriotism and the tendency among religious majoritarians and secularists alike to confuse uniformity with unity. The speeches in Parliament draw on a rich historical repertoire to offer valuable lessons in political ethics. In arguing against the dangers of an intolerant religious majoritarianism, this book makes a case for concepts of layered and shared sovereignty that might enable an overarching sense of Indian nationhood to coexist with multiple identities of the country's diverse populace. The Nation as Mother delves into history to evoke an alternative future of a new India based on cultural intimacy among its different communities.

The RSS

The RSS
Author: A. G. Noorani
Publisher: Leftword Books
Total Pages: 548
Release: 2020
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9788194077879

India is battling for its very soul. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) is the most powerful organization in India today; complete with a private army of its own, unquestionably obeying its leader who functions on fascist lines on the Fuehrer principle. Two of its pracharaks (active preachers) have gone on to become prime ministers of India. In 1951 it set up a political front, the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, which merged into the Janata Party in 1977 only to walk out of it in 1980. In issue was its superior loyalty to its parent and mentor, the RSS; not the Janata Party. Within months of its defection, the Jana Sangh reemerged; not with the name under which it had functioned for nearly three decades, but as the Bharatiya Janata Party, deceptively to claim a respectable lineage. The RSS is at war with India's past. It belittles three of the greatest builders of the Indian State - Ashoka, the Buddhist; Akbar, the Muslim; and Nehru, a civilized Enlightened Hindu. It would wipe out centuries of achievement for which the world has acclaimed India and replace that with its own narrow, divisive ideology. This book is a magisterial study of the RSS, from its formation in 1925 to the present day. With scrupulous and voluminous evidence, one of India's leading constitutional experts and political analysts, A.G. Noorani, builds a watertight case to show how the RSS is much more than a threat to communal amity. It poses a wider challenge. It is a threat to democratic governance and, even worse, a menace to India. It threatens the very soul of India. And yet, despite its reach and seemingly overwhelming political influence, the author shows that the RSS can be defeated. The soul of India can be rescued.