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Social background of Indian nationalism pdf download

SOCIAL BACKGROUND OF INDIAN NATIONALISM
Book Title Social Background Of Indian Nationalism
Book AuthorDesai
Total Pages399
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Social background of Indian nationalism

A SOCIAL BACKGROUND OF INDIAN NATIONALISM

. R. Desai’s Social Background of Indian Nationalism. A. R. Desai’s life was a rare and exemplary combination of activism and scholarship. What he modestly described in the first edition of this book as a “limited association with the student, working-class, Kisan and political

nationalist movements in my student days” was in fact a lifelong commitment and involvement in socialist and democratic causes:

as pioneer Marxist theoretician, activist for a time in the Revolutionary Socialist Party, a major inspiration for a variety of Marxian Left—and particularly Trotskyian—groups in Bombay and Gujarat, and from the 1960s onwards, a central figure in all civil liberties initiatives in western India.

This went along with dedicated and rigorous scholarship, as a sociologist and historian, author of numerous highly influential studies on nationalism, rural sociology, and urbanisation, and editor of two important collections on peasant struggles in India.

Social Background of Indian Nationalism remains A.R. Desai’s most widely-read book, as revealed immediately by a glance at its publication date. Written as a doctoral thesis in 1946, it was first published in 1948.

New editions came out in 1954, 1959, 1966, and 1976, and since then there have been no less than twelve reprints down to 1998. The book has also been translated into many Indian languages.

For fifty years, it has served generations of students all over the country as an introduction to modern Indian history, and one which for many has also provided a highly accessible illustration of the Marxist historical method.

Continued relevance for five decades is deeply impressive, but also a source for some problems. There had been some authorial revisions and in 1960 a

supplementary volume, Recent Trends in Indian Nationalism, continuing the narrative beyond the original end-point of 1939 down to the 1950s.

No revision has been possible, however, since 1976, and in essence, the volume remains a product of the 1940s.

What this means is that the vast majority of detailed, archive-based regional studies of twentieth-century nationalist and popular movements which came out after access to official records was eased (in the mid-1970s) remains uncovered.

Nor could there be discussion or critical review of many of the major historiographical tendencies and debates that perforce must figure prominently in any study of colonial Indian history today:

the so-called ‘Cambridge’ and ‘Subaltern’ schools, most obviously, but also very important recent work on the early colonial period, economic history, pioneering studies of caste and gender, the recent vogue for critiques of ‘colonial discourse’.

Marxist historical approaches have also changed enormously, in content, method, and style—changes about which Professor Desai was of course fully aware, but which he had no time to integrate into his 1948 book.

And yet Social Background retains relevance and value, to a degree that could be missed by a hasty reader today, driven off by a language that too many nowadays might appear somewhat wooden and dated.

It remains, in the first place, one of the very few synoptic, integrated single-volume accounts we have of the economic, social, and political aspects of colonial India, written from a Marxist perspective:

standing comparison with Rajani Palme Dutt’s India Today, perhaps, but more simply written and therefore accessible to those encountering modern Indian history—and/or Marxist history—for the first time. With the proliferation of detailed, most often region or locality-based research, such synoptic efforts have become both difficult and rare.

But history imbued with progressive values needs to remain accessible to audiences immensely wider

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