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When the influential Marxist historian Perry Anderson ventured into Indian territory, he did not bargain for this . . .
Partha
Chatterjee, Sudipta Kaviraj, Nivedita Menon
The Indian Ideology
Three Responses to Perry Anderson
With an Introduction by Sanjay Ruparelia
When the Marxist historian
Perry Anderson published The
Indian Ideology—his scathing assessment of India’s democracy, secularism, nationalism,
and statehood—it created a furore. Anderson attacked
subcontinental unity as a myth, castigated Mahatma Gandhi
for infusing Hindu religiosity into nationalism, blamed Congress
for Partition, and saw India’s liberal intelligentsia as by and large a
feckless lot.
Within the large array of responses
to Anderson that appeared, three stand out for the care and comprehensiveness
with which they show the levels of ignorance, arrogance, and misconstruction on
which the Andersonian variety of political analysis is based. Collectively, these three ripostes represent
a systematic critique of the intellectual
foundations of The Indian
Ideology.
Confronting
Anderson’s claim to originality,
Nivedita
Menon exposes his failure to
engage with feminist, Marxist,
and Dalit scholarship, arguing that a British colonial ideology is at work in
such analyses. Partha
Chatterjee studies
key historical episodes to
counter the “Great Men” view of history, suggesting that misplaced concepts from Western
intellectual history can
obfuscate political
understanding. Tracing
their origins to the nineteenth-century worldview of Hegel and James Mill, Sudipta Kaviraj contends
that reductive Orientalist tropes such as those deployed by Anderson
frequently mar European analyses of non-European contexts.
Vigorous polemic merges with
political analysis here, and critique with debate, to create a work that is
intellectually sophisticated and unusually entertaining.
partha chatterjee is Professor of Anthropology and South Asian Studies, Columbia University, New York, and
Honorary Professor, Centre for
Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta. His many
books include Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World (1986), The Nation and Its Fragments
(1993), A Possible India (1997),
The Politics of the Governed (2004), Lineages of Political Society (2011), and The Black
Hole of Empire (2012).
sudipta kaviraj is Professor of Indian Politics and Intellectual History at Columbia University. He taught for many
years at SOAS, London University,
following a long teaching stint at Jawaharlal
Nehru University, New Delhi. He has been a Fellow of St Antony’s College, Oxford, and a
visiting professor at the University
of California, Berkeley, as well as at the University of Chicago. His most recent books are The Invention of Private
Life (2014), The Trajectories of the Indian State (2012), The
Enchantment of Democracy and India (2011), and The Imaginary Institution
of India (2010).
nivedita menon is Professor, Centre for Comparative Politics and Political
Theory, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. She is the author, most
recently, of Seeing like a Feminist (2012) and editor (with Aditya Nigam
and Sanjay Palshikar) of Critical Studies in Politics: Exploring
Sites, Selves, Power (2013). An active commentator on contemporary issues
in newspapers and on the blog kafila.org, she has translated fiction and
nonfiction from Hindi and Malayalam into English.
sanjay ruparelia is Assistant Professor of Politics at the New School for
Social Research, New York. His publications include Divided We Govern:
Coalition Politics in Modern India (2015), and Understanding
India’s New Political Economy: A Great Transformation? (2011).
Hardback / 175pp / Rs 495 / World rights / April 2015
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