HOW INDIA BECAME ONE COUNTRY

BEYOND BELIEF: India and the Politics of Postcolonial Nationalism, by Srirupa Roy

Beyond Belief rethinks the formation and consolidation of nation-state ideologies. Analysing the first two decades after Indian Independence, Srirupa Roy shows how nationalists were turned into nationals, subjects into citizens, and the colonial state into a sovereign nation-state.

The idea that nations come into being as 'imagined communities' is not adequate when you look at India. Here the state makes itself more than manifest as the only possible glue for diverse communities to stick through thick and thin, like it or not, leaving very little for these communities to imagine.

Hardback / 260 pages / ISBN 81-7824-211-7 / Rs 595 / For sale in South Asia only / Published in September 2007 / Copublished by Duke University Press

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Romila Thapar remembers an old friend

A few weeks before he passed away, Eric Hobsbawm and his wife invited Romila Thapar to the historian’s 95 th birthday party in London. John Williams played the guitar. The gathered companions drank to the great man’s health. He was convivial and had all his wits about him—as seems evident in the pictures below. A century seemed possible ... In her obituary below, Romila Thapar recounts what Hobsbawm’s work meant to her, and its intellectual legacy more broadly. REMEMBERING ERIC HOBSBAWM Romila Thapar Eric Hobsbawm was the kind of historian whose work, although largely on the last three centuries of European history, was relevant even to those of us who work on a different space and time. The process of historical investigation for him was not restricted to a narrow engagement with a specific subject, but with having to situate it in an extensive ...

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