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Showing posts from February, 2014

THE COUNTRY THAT EMERGED OUT OF CONTINGENCY

Srinath Raghavan 1971 A Global History of the Creation of Bangladesh Like all writers, academics watch the progress of their peers, tracking who’s publishing what, noting who’s flying high or plunging low, registering reputations, spreading the gossip that predisposes hiring committees this way or that. The consensus among such scholarly peer-watchers is likely to be that an uncommonly impressive young achiever in their community is Srinath Raghavan, whose debut work, War and Peace in Modern India (Permanent Black and Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), drew on a huge pile of untapped documentation to illuminate Nehru’s approach to war and desire for peace—within India, in relation to Hyderabad, Goa, Bengal, etc., as well as externally, with China and Pakistan. The book ran to nearly 400 pages, elicited a load of acclamatory reviews, and brilliantly bridged the gap that often separates the disciplines of international relations, history, and war studies. Earlier this year, 2013,