Specters of Mother India

Specters of Mother India
Author: Mrinalini Sinha
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 387
Release: 2006-07-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 0822387972

Specters of Mother India tells the complex story of one episode that became the tipping point for an important historical transformation. The event at the center of the book is the massive international controversy that followed the 1927 publication of Mother India, an exposé written by the American journalist Katherine Mayo. Mother India provided graphic details of a variety of social ills in India, especially those related to the status of women and to the particular plight of the country’s child wives. According to Mayo, the roots of the social problems she chronicled lay in an irredeemable Hindu culture that rendered India unfit for political self-government. Mother India was reprinted many times in the United States, Great Britain, and India; it was translated into more than a dozen languages; and it was reviewed in virtually every major publication on five continents. Sinha provides a rich historical narrative of the controversy surrounding Mother India, from the book’s publication through the passage in India of the Child Marriage Restraint Act in the closing months of 1929. She traces the unexpected trajectory of the controversy as critics acknowledged many of the book’s facts only to overturn its central premise. Where Mayo located blame for India’s social backwardness within the beliefs and practices of Hinduism, the critics laid it at the feet of the colonial state, which they charged with impeding necessary social reforms. As Sinha shows, the controversy became a catalyst for some far-reaching changes, including a reconfiguration of the relationship between the political and social spheres in colonial India and the coalescence of a collective identity for women.

Round Table Conference Geographies

Round Table Conference Geographies
Author: Stephen Legg
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 415
Release: 2022-11-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 1009276719

Round Table Conference Geographies explores a major international conference in 1930s London which determined India's constitutional future in the British Empire. Pre-dating the decolonising conferences of the 1950s–60s, the Round Table Conference laid the blueprint for India's future federal constitution. Despite this the conference is unanimously read as a failure, for not having comprehensively reconciled the competing demands of liberal and Indian National Congress politicians, of Hindus and Muslims, and of British versus Princely India. This book argues that the conference's three sessions were vital sites of Indian and imperial politics that demand serious attention. It explores the spatial politics of the conference in terms of its imaginary geographies, infrastructures, host city, and how the conference was contested and represented. The book concludes by asking who gained through representing the conference as a failure and explores it, instead, as a teeming political, social and material space.

Political Representation In India

Political Representation In India
Author: Abhay V Datar
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2021-12-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 9389812542

Political Representation in India: Ideas and Contestations, 1908–1952 maps extensive and wide-ranging debates, marked by contestations and strident demands on political representation in colonial India. Further, it explores these themes during the Constitution-framing process. These debates, previously overlooked, are significant for they helped shape the institutional structures of political representation in the form of the electoral system of Indian democracy. It assists in providing an answer to why and how independent India came to adopt its current electoral system characterised by the First-Past-The-Post (FPTP) system. It also analyses how and why the alternatives to FPTP, primarily any form of proportional representation, were rejected. Moreover, the book simultaneously provides a rich and detailed description of how communities, and religious, caste and ethnic categories came to be defined as their demands for political representation were conceded. It also briefly deals with the issue of delimitation of constituencies during the colonial and the immediate post-independence period.

Road to Pakistan

Road to Pakistan
Author: B. R. Nanda
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 384
Release: 2013-07-03
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1136704779

This is a biography of Mohammad Ali Jinnah and the story of the creation of Pakistan. At a time of much interest and concern about Pakistan in the international community, this volume provides a historical context which helps in an understanding of the present. It traces the development of the Muslim identity on the Indian subcontinent and follows Jinnah as he rode the wave of Muslim communalism to ultimate success in the demand for the partition of India and the creation of Pakistan at independence from British rule. Jinnah’s successful espousal of the demand for Pakistan was a remarkable feat. In achieving this success, Jinnah traversed a long distance from the beliefs with which he entered public life. He started out a nationalist, as a protégé of senior Congress leaders like Dadabhai Naoroji. However, the introduction of separate electorates for Muslims after the Minto–Morley reforms in 1909 led him to change his position in order to appeal to his changed constituency. Even so, it was not until 1937 that he unabashedly played the religious card. He now began to see the Congress and the Hindus as his adversaries rather than the British. Through these twists and turns of posture, the one constant factor was his underlying ambition to remain in a position of leadership and eminence. This volume traces the zigzag course of Jinnah’s political life and the establishment of Pakistan within the broader framework of the Indian freedom struggle. Indeed the main players in this struggle with three protagonists were the Indian National Congress and the British rulers. This work demonstrates how this bigger struggle opened the door for Muslim separatism led by Jinnah. It was through this opening, aided by British moves to use the Muslim League as a foil to the Congress, that Jinnah very astutely led his party to success in its demand for the creation of Pakistan.

A Short Catalogue

A Short Catalogue
Author: India. High Commissioner in the United Kingdom. Library
Publisher:
Total Pages: 556
Release: 1933
Genre: Catalogs, Classified (Dewey decimal)
ISBN: