Selected Titles on
Making Modern South Asia
Muslim Zion: Pakistan as a Political Idea
Pakistan, founded less than a decade after a homeland for India’s Muslims was proposed, is both the embodiment of national ambitions fulfilled and, in the eyes of many observers, a failed state. Muslim Zion cuts to the core of the geopolitical paradoxes entangling Pakistan to argue that India’s rival has never been a nation-state in the conventional sense. Pakistan is instead a distinct type of political geography, ungrounded in the historic connections of lands and peoples, whose context is provided by the settler states of the New World but whose closest ideological parallel is the state of Israel.
Transforming India: Challenges to the World’s Largest Democracy
A nation of 1.25 billion people composed of numerous ethnic, linguistic, religious, and caste communities, India is the world’s most diverse democracy. Drawing on his extensive fieldwork and experience of Indian politics, Sumantra Bose tells the story of democracy’s evolution in India since the 1950s—and describes the many challenges it faces in the early twenty-first century. India’s transformation into a polity of, by, and for the people depends on tackling great problems of poverty, inequality, and oppression. This tension helps explain why Maoist revolutionaries wage war on the republic, and why people in the Kashmir Valley feel they are not full citizens. As India dramatically emerges on the global stage, Transforming India provides invaluable analysis of its complexity and distinctiveness.
1971: A Global History of the Creation of Bangladesh
“A deeply impressive book at many levels: in the depth of its research (conducted in more than a dozen archives spread across four continents), in the acuity of its analyses, and in the power of its prose. The thematic scope is as striking as its spatial scale, with the author exploring and uncovering the military, political, economic, and cultural dimensions of the 1971 conflict. Through this magnificent work of scholarship, Srinath Raghavan has confirmed his standing as the leading historian of his generation.”—Ramachandra Guha, author of India After Gandhi
Crossing the Bay of Bengal: The Furies of Nature and the Fortunes of Migrants
The Indian Ocean was global long before the Atlantic, and today the countries bordering the Bay of Bengal—India, Bangladesh, Burma, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Malaysia—are home to one in four people on Earth. Crossing the Bay of Bengal places this region at the heart of world history for the first time. Integrating human and environmental history, Sunil Amrith gives a revelatory and stirring new account of the Bay and those who have inhabited it.
“Admirably ambitious yet eminently readable, Crossing the Bay of Bengal is one of the most engaging works of history to come my way in a long time.”—Amitav Ghosh, writing at amitavghosh.com
The Gandhian Moment
2011 Josep Palau i Fabre International Essay Prize, Unpublished Work Category, Palau Foundation
“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
The Great Indian Phone Book: How the Cheap Cell Phone Changes Business, Politics, and Daily Life
“The conversation about [the cellphone’s] social effects usually takes the form of lamenting obnoxious people… Fortunately, we now have Assa Doron and Robin Jeffrey’s The Great Indian Phone Book, which offers a comprehensive look at what cell phones have meant for India. Their story covers everything from family relations and gender barriers to terrorism and the relations of citizens to the state… [T]he authors have managed to write a superb book—informative, insightful, witty—that is essential reading for anyone interested in India, or technological change, or good stories told with clarity and purpose.”—Isaac Chotiner, The Wall Street Journal
Righteous Republic: The Political Foundations of Modern India
A Guardian “Authors’ Favourites” Book of the Year, 2012 • A New Republic Best Book of 2012 • 2011 Thomas J. Wilson Memorial Prize, Harvard University Press
“Ananya Vajpeyi’s Righteous Republic is quite simply the most important interpretation of the evolution of India’s contemporary nationhood since Sunil Khilnani’s The Idea of India, and a useful antidote to the revisionist Imperialism of rising British star-historians like Andrew Roberts and Niall Ferguson… Fluently written, cogent in argument, studded with penetrating insights, telling aphorisms, with complete mastery of her material, consistently brilliant expression and exposition, this young philosopher-historian takes her definitive place as a commentator and synthesizer of the often varied and contradictory approaches to the idea of India.”—Mani Shankar Aiyar, Financial Express
The Impossible Indian: Gandhi and the Temptation of Violence
A Hindu Notable Book of 2012
“Faisal Devji’s The Impossible Indian is an audacious book… [I]nstead of foregrounding Gandhi’s non-violence, Devji explores what he calls ‘the temptation to violence.’ His earlier work on jihad and terror gives him insights into the fascination with violence as a legitimate means of politics… He shows Gandhi engaged with the question of violence inherent in Empire and fascism… Devji convincingly argues that, for Gandhi, sovereignty and its validation lies not in the State but within the ethical self—a self rooted in dharma and engaged in moral negotiations with real and potential violence… Devji’s Gandhi [is] a political philosopher whose revolutionary potential is yet to be grasped.”
—Tridip Suhrud, The Caravan
Gandhi’s Printing Press: Experiments in Slow Reading
“Deepens our understanding… [Gandhi’s] sparse, unadorned, direct prose had much to do with his early training in writing for Indian Opinion… The most significant part of the work is a theory of reading… [Hofmeyr] shows that Gandhi consciously tried to cultivate a style of writing that required slow, meditative reading; his purpose was to adjust the act of reading to unhurried bodily rhythms not subject to the fast pace that he considered the chief signifier of the industrial age… Hofmeyr’s elucidation of the manner in which a satyagrahi reads illuminates our understanding of Gandhi’s modes of writing and discoursing.”—Tridip Suhrud, The Caravan
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
A New Statesman Book of the Year, 2011
“This new anthology…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
