BEYOND NATIONALIST FRAMES: Postmodernism, Hindu Fundamentalism, History

by Sarkar, Sumit

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Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2002. vi, 265 pp. Bibliographical footnotes, index. Reflections on the practice of history and contemporary politics by one of India's most eminent historians. The political context in which historians of India find themselves today, claims the author, is dominated by the advance of the Hindu Right and globalized forms of capitalism, while the historian's intellectual context is dominated by the marginalization of all varieties of Marxism and an academic shift to cultural studies and postmodern critique. In this book, one of India's foremost contemporary historians offers his view of how the craft of history should be practiced in this complex conjuncture. In studies of colonial time-keeping, Rabindranath Tagore's fiction, and pre-Independence Bengal, Sarkar explores new approaches to the writing of history. Essays on contemporary politics consider the implications of the "Hindu Bomb," the rewriting of national history textbooks by Hindu fundamentalists, and the issue of conversion to Christianity. CONTENTS: Introduction. 1) Colonial times: clocks and Kali-yuga. 2) Indentities and histories: some lower-caste narratives from early twentieth-century Bengal. 3) Intimations of Hindutva: indeologies, caste, and class in post-Swadeshi Bengal. 4) Two Muslim tracts for peasants: Bengal 1909-1910. 5) Nationalism and "Stri-Swadhinata": the contexts and meanings of Rabindranath's "Ghare-Baire." 6) Postmodernism and the writing of history. 7) The BJP bomb and nationalism. 8) Christianity, Hindutva, and the question of conversions. 9) Hindutva and history. NOTE: This book is printed in South Asia and the production quality is somewhat lower than in the West.. First Edition. Hardcover. Like New/Like New. 23 x 15 cm.

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