HI297: Twentieth Century India: Colonialism,
Democracy and Protest
LECTURE AND SEMINAR SCHEDULE:
Term 1: Themes and Trajectories
Week 1:
Week 2: Introductory Session
Week 3: Colonialism and its Legacies
Seminar Readings:
1. Anil Seal, “Imperialism and Nationalism in India”,
Modern Asian Studies, 1973
2. Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments
(chapter on the colonial state)
Background Readings:
1. Sekhar Bandyopadhyay, From Plassey To Partition
2. Sumit Sarkar, Modern India: 1885-1947, chapter 1.
3. Indivar Kamtekar, “A Different War Dance: State
and Class in India 1939-1945” (Past and Present,
2002)
4. Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal, Modern South Asia
5. Peter Robb, A History of India
Week 4: Indian Democracy, 1947-77
Seminar Readings:
1. Benjamin Zachariah, Nehru (‘Interlude: Envisioning
the New India’)
2. Sudipta Kaviraj, “The Passive Revolution and India:
A Critique” (from The Trajectories of the Indian
State)
Background Readings:
1. Ramachandra Guha, India after Gandhi
2. Ayesha Jalal, Democracy and Authoritarianism in
South Asia
3. Francine Frankel, India’s Political Economy 1947-
2004
Week 5: Indian Democracy, 1977 –
Seminar Readings:
1. Sudipta Kaviraj, “The Passive Revolution and India:
A Critique” (from The Trajectories of the Indian
State)
2. Sudipta Kaviraj, “The Politics of Liberalization in
India” (from The Trajectories of the Indian State)
3. Nivedita Menon and Aditya Nigam: Power and
Contestation: India since 1989 (Introduction)
Background Readings:
1. Ramachandra Guha, India After Gandhi
2. Ayesha Jalal, Democracy and Authoritarianism in
South Asia
3. Siddhartha Deb, The Beautiful and the Damned
4. Pankaj Mishra, Butter Chicken in Ludhiana
5. Achin Vanaik, The Painful Transition: Bourgeois
Democracy in India
Reading Week
Week 7: Gandhian Movements and Indian Politics
Seminar Readings:
1. Shahid Amin, “Gandhi As Mahatma” (Subaltern
Studies II)
2. Eugene F. Irschick: “Gandhian Non-Violent Protest:
Rituals of Avoidance or Rituals of Confrontation?”
(Economic and Political Weekly, 1986)
3. JP Narayan, “Gandhi, Vinoba and the Bhoodan
Movement”
4. Sumanta Banerjee, “Anna Hazare, Civil Society and
the State” (Economic and Political Weekly, 2011)
Background Readings:
1. Sumit Sarkar, Modern India 1885-1947
2. Partha Chatterjee, “Gandhi and the Critique of Civil
Society”
3. Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the
Colonial World
4. Ramachandra Guha, Gandhi Before India
5. Faisal Devji, The Impossible Indian: Gandhi and
the Temptation of Violence
6. Kathryn Tidrick, Gandhi: A Political and Spiritual
Life
7. Bhiku Parekh, Gandhi: A Very Short Introduction
8. Norman Finkelstein, What Gandhi Says
9. Judith Brown, “The Mahatma and Modern India”
10.
Harold Coward (ed.) Indian Critiques of
Gandhi
11.
Arundhati Roy, “The Doctor and the Saint”,
available online, Outlook magazine.
12.
David Hardiman: Gandhi in his time and ours
13.
David Arnold: Gandhi
14.
Claude Markovits: The Un-Gandhian Gandhi
Week 8: The Long Rise of the Hindu Right
Seminar Readings:
1. P.K. Datta: “Dying Hindus: The Production of
Communal Commonsense in Early 20th Century
Bengal” (EPW, 1993)
2. Chetan Bhatt, Hindu Nationalism, chapters 5 and 6
Background Readings:
1. Gyanendra Pandey, “Rallying around the Cow”
2. Thomas Blom Hansen, The Saffron Wave
3. Christophe Jaffrelot, Hindu Nationalism: A Reader
4. Basu et al, Khaki Shorts, Saffron Flags
5. B.D. Graham, The Hindu Nationalist Movement
and Indian Politics
6. Communal Riots in India: A Chronology (19472003)
Week 9: The Indian Left
Seminar Readings:
1. Stephen Sherlock: “Berlin, Moscow and Bombay:
The Marxism That India Inherited” (South Asia,
1998)
2. Manali Desai, State Formation and Radical Politics
in India, chapter 6
3. Sudeep Chakrabarti, Red Sun: Travels in Naxalite
Country, Introduction
4. Arundhati Roy, “Walking with the Comrades”
Background Readings:
1. Sumit Sarkar, Modern India 1885-1947
2. Partha Chatterjee, The Present Politics of West
Bengal
3. Nivedita Menon and Aditya Nigam, ‘Old Left, New
Left’ (in Power and Contestation: India Since 1989)
4. Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, “From neighbourhood to
nation: the rise and fall of the Left in Bombay’s
Girangaon in the twentieth century” (in History,
Culture and the Indian City)
Week 10: Dalit Movements and Caste Politics
Seminar Readings:
1. Gerard Baader: “The Depressed Classes in India:
Their Struggle for Emancipation” (Studies: An Irish
Quarterly Review, 1937)
2. Christophe Jaffrelot: “Sanskritization v.
Ethnicization in India: Changing Identities and
Caste Politics Before Mandal” (Asian Survey, 2000)
3. Nivedita Menon and Aditya Nigam, “The
Recalcitrance of Caste” (from Power and
Contestation: India Since 1989)
4. Gail Omvedt, Understanding Caste (pp.48-97 :
chapters 7-12)
Background Readings:
1. Christophe Jaffrelot, The Silent Revolution
2. B.R. Ambedkar, The Annihilation of Caste
3. Arundhati Roy, ‘Introduction’ to The Annihilation
of Caste
4. Sekhar Bandyopadhyay, “Transfer of Power and the
Crisis of Dalit Politics in India, 1945-47”
5. Omprakash Valmiki, Joothan. A Dalit’s Life
6. Vasant Moon, Growing up Untouchable in India. A
Dalit Autobiography
Term 2: Key Texts and Arguments
In term 2, the emphasis will shift to political arguments
and texts: there will be fewer readings but more intense
engagement with individual texts.
Week 11: Gandhi, Hind Swaraj
Week 12: Gandhi, Hind Swaraj and miscellaneous other
writings
Week 13: Savarkar, Hindutva
Week 14: Savarkar, Hindutva
Week 15: Ambedkar, The Annihilation of Caste
Reading Week
Week 16: Ambedkar, The Annihilation of Caste
Week 17: Communist Memoirs and Testimonies
(readings TBA)
Week 18: Communist Memoirs and Testimonies
Week 19: Contemporary Movements (tbc)
Week 20: Contemporary Movements (tbc)
Week 21: Film Screening and discussion
Week 22: Film Screening and discussion
Revision Session (tbc)
Readings
Selected Basic Texts:
1. Ramachandra Guha, India after Gandhi
2. Francine Frankel, India’s Political Economy 1947-
2004
3. Sumit Sarkar, Modern India 1885-1947
4. Sumit Sarkar, Modern Times
5. Sekhar Bandyopadhyay, From Plassey to Partition
6. Peter Robb, A History of India
7. Burton Stein, A History of India
8. Achin Vanaik, The Painful Transition: Bourgeois
Democracy in India
9. Sudipta Kaviraj, The Trajectories of the Indian State
10.
Partha Chatterjee, The Politics of the Governed
11.
Nivedita Menon and Aditya Nigam, Power and
Contestation: India since 1989
12.
Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal, Modern South
Asia
13.
Benjamin Zachariah, Nehru
14.
Benjamin Zachariah, Developing India
15.
Vivek Chibber, Locked in Place: State-Building
and Late Industrialization in India
16.
Thomas and Barbara Metcalf, A Concise
History of Modern India
17.
Stuart Corbridge et al, Seeing The State:
Governance and Governmentality in India
18.
Siddhartha Deb, The Beautiful and the
Damned
19.
Pankaj Mishra, Butter Chicken in Ludhiana
20.
C.A. Bayly, Indian Society and the Making of
the British Empire
21.
K. Balagopal, Ear to the Ground: Selected
Writings on Class and Caste
(The most important reference texts for the course are
highlighted above)
Primary Resources:
1. Times of India – you can access the full run of this
newspaper from the 1830s to the present through the
library’s online resources. It’s invaluable for
researchers, and will be very helpful as a supplement
to your readings, and to deepen your knowledge of the
field.
2. British Parliamentary Papers – also online through the
library’s database collection
3. Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, available
online
4. Collected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru, available online
5. Youtube resources: Indian internet resources are
usually less than reliable – there’s a great deal of
bigotry and hate speech masquerading as historical
knowledge. Nevertheless, there are some invaluable
resources. On Youtube’s British Pathe channel, you
can find thousands of videos about modern Indian
history, of variable lengths – great footage.
Journals:
Since much of the period under discussion in the
module is unevenly covered by available monographs,
academic and non-academic journals and magazines
furnish some of the more reliable accounts available. All
of these are either in the public domain or available
through the library’s online resources.
Academic Journals:
Economic and Political Weekly
Indian Economic and Social History Review
Modern Asian Studies
Comparative Studies in South Asia, Africa and the
Middle East
Comparative Studies in Society and History
Indian Historical Review
South Asia
Journal of Peasant Studies
Past and Present
“Non-Academic” Journals and Magazines:
Caravan magazine
Outlook magazine
Seminar
Tehelka
The Hindu (newspaper, available online)
The Guardian (very occasional coverage, but check out
the writings of Priyamvada Gopal and Pankaj Mishra on
the website)
Essays
Essay Questions:
1. How did political conflicts in the late-colonial era
mark the politics of the post-Independence period?
2. What was the ‘Congress system’ in Indian politics?
How and why did it enter into crisis?
3. Why was Gandhi able to mobilize mass support
among the Indian peasantry?
4. What was ‘Nehruvian socialism’?
5. Why was socialism such a widely shared point of
reference in post-Independence politics, and how
have matters changed in this regard?
6. Discuss the concept of ‘passive revolution’, with
reference to the post-colonial Indian state.
7. Why was Emergency declared in 1975?
8. Discuss the major shifts in the history of Indian
Communism up till Independence.
9. How did economic liberalization transform Indian
politics?
10.
Why did the Hindu Right grow so rapidly from
the 1980s onward?
11.
Discuss the case for Indian freedom laid out in
Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj.
12.
What were the distinctive features of Gandhi’s
conception of Swaraj?
13.
Discuss the main features of Ambedkar’s
critique of the caste system, as laid out in his
Annihilation of Caste.
14.
Was Gandhi a nationalist?
15.
On what basis did Savarkar make the case for
India as a Hindu nation?
16.
What impact did the destruction of the Babri
Masjid have upon Indian democracy?
17.
Discuss the main shifts in Dalit politics since
Independence.
18.
Explore the way in which political motifs are
formulated in any one of the following films: 1.
Gandhi, 2. Rang de Basanti , 3. Shri 420, 4. Mother
India, 5. Hazaaron Khwaishen Aisi 6.
Kathapurushan
19.
Discuss the main tensions within the Indian
Left after Independence, and analyse their
consequences.
20.
How did Savarkar, Ambedkar and Gandhi’s
political visions differ?
21.
Did Indian politics change fundamentally after
the Emergency?
22.
Did colonialism fracture or integrate Indian
society and politics?