Selected Titles on
Making Modern India
The Gandhian Moment
“More than ever, the world needs Gandhi today. Especially, in the face of Islam and Muslims being portrayed as synonymous with terrorism populist ideological responses of political Islam to Western hegemony have proved counterproductive. [Jahanbegloo] exhorts Muslim leaders to draw upon not only Gandhi but upon the non-violent contributions of people like [Abdul] Ghaffar Khan and [Maulana] Azad. For [Jahanbegloo], Gandhi’s formulations of self-examination, self-criticism and self-purification and their adaptations by leaders like Ghaffar Khan and Azad provide useful tools for taking Western models of conflict resolution towards more nuanced models of non-violence and peace.”
—Swaran Singh, The Hindu
Gandhi’s Printing Press: Experiments in Slow Reading
“Gandhi was one of history’s most avid experimenters. His most audacious forms of utopianism were often nothing more than simple and ingenious experiments. Hofmeyr tells the remarkable story, with elegance and great learning, of how Gandhi imagined a radically different world simply by attending to the potentialities of the printing press. Very few books on Gandhi capture the minutiae and horizons of his world with such riveting intelligence.”
—Uday Mehta, City University of New York
The Great Indian Phone Book: How the Cheap Cell Phone Changes Business, Politics, and Daily Life
“Superb… Reminds us how little we have explored the new landscape of opportunity, aspiration and, inevitably, disappointment that mobile phones have opened up in India… [A] lively book.”—Pankaj Mishra, Bloomberg.com
“Doron and Jeffrey’s landmark study of how the humble mobile phone is changing the culture of Indian democracy in everyday life has no competitors. Their interdisciplinary analysis of popular aspirations and anxieties surrounding mobile telephones will…inspire comparative studies set in other emerging economies. A remarkable achievement.”—Dipesh Chakrabarty, University of Chicago
Righteous Republic: The Political Foundations of Modern India
“In a series of sophisticated and original readings, Ananya Vajpeyi paints an arresting picture of the moral imaginary inside the tradition of modern Indian political thought. Against the grain of much recent interpretation, Vajpeyi argues that modern Indian political thought should be read not through Western categories like freedom, equality, and independence, but through subtle, underlying Indian categories—swaraj, viraha, samvega, dharma, artha, and duhkha. Righteous Republic offers an original and subtle re-reading of a familiar field, and persuades us to view it in a different light.”
—Sudipta Kaviraj, Columbia University
The Impossible Indian: Gandhi and the Temptation of Violence
“Freeing himself from both the hagiographic cant and cynical clichés, Devji has presented us with a Gandhian book about the Mahatma, embracing contradiction, forsaking easy friends and embracing obvious enemies. Devji is able to show that Gandhi sought nothing less than to erect a new sort of moral subject in India during British rule, a subject who can, even at great cost, make history as she pleases, placing the exigencies of justice, freedom, and truth securely within the search for a sovereign self, free of the tyrannies of various seductive images of the inevitability of political modernity. Neither Gandhi nor political theory will be the same again.”
—Arjun Appadurai
Makers of Modern India
“Guha has produced a pioneering anthology that provides an indispensable introduction to the rich diversity of Indian political argument and a testament to the intellectual ferment out of which India emerged. While interest in the contours of India’s democracy grows, there is little high-quality material available on the political traditions that have constituted it. Makers of Modern India admirably fills this gap and goes further, offering a map of modern Indian political debate.”
—Sunil Khilnani, Johns Hopkins University
Citizenship and Its Discontents: An Indian History
“A contribution to our understanding of citizenship and democracy in India that is empirically rich and theoretically sophisticated.”
—Amrita Basu, Amherst College
The Essential Tagore
“This new anthology, edited by Fakrul Alam and Radha Chakravarty, is so welcome, because it starts the process of freeing Tagore for a contemporary audience. The first thing that strikes you about The Essential Tagore is the diversity of its subject’s talents: In a career that stretched over seventy-three years (he finished his first poem when he was seven, and was composing a story on his deathbed), Tagore wrote novels, plays, literary criticism, political essays on the iniquities of the British Raj, and descriptions of his travels in Persia and Japan…The experience of living in today’s India—a country that is agrarian, industrializing, and postindustrial, all at once—still forces a multiplicity of viewpoints on the individual, and Tagore must have some claim to being the prototypical modern Indian.”
—Aravind Adiga, Bookforum
Changing Homelands: Hindu Politics and the Partition of India
“The well-researched study, providing a wealth of information drawn from a wide variety of sources, serves more than a purely academic purpose. It gives the lay reader a clearer understanding of the subcontinent’s history in its crucial phase, the part of history that continues to be distorted by diverse groups of holy crusaders.”
—J. Sri Raman, The Hindu
His Majesty’s Opponent: Subhas Chandra Bose and India’s Struggle against Empire
“Subhas Chandra Bose was perhaps the most enigmatic of the great Indian leaders fighting for independence in the twentieth century. This wonderful book makes a major contribution to the understanding of the political, social and moral commitments of Netaji, the great leader, as he was called by his contemporaries.”
—Amartya Sen
Colored Cosmopolitanism: The Shared Struggle for Freedom in the United States and India
“Nico Slate provides a wide-ranging tour of the interactions that knit together the African American and South Asian freedom movements, as intellectuals and activists fashioned new ideas of freedom and justice, pushing against each others’ worlds to find more generous renderings of social practice and political strategy.”
—Vijay Prashad, author of The Karma of Brown Folk and The Darker Nations
![Celebrating 100 Years of Excellence in Publishing: Harvard University Press Centennial, 1913-2013 [Picture of birthday cake]](/images/badges/hup-centennial.jpg)
