British rule provided for administrative unification, unified communication within India, with English as the link language. This created a pan-Indian space in which it became possible for Indians to ‘imagine’ India. Some tried to imagine a pan-Indian identity. Others imagined a nation based on caste and religion. Yet others preferred to plead for people to subordinate the idea of a nation based on primordial loyalties to a pan-Indian nation based on nationalism (p. 18). These ideas form the bases of this extremely costly but thinly argued book.
In its scope and style, this book is comparable to seminal literature in agrarian history such as Tzvetan Todorov’s The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other, and Charles Mann’s 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus and 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created which, like Bhattacharya’s deconstruction of colonial documents and literature, draw on the Spanish conquistadors’ reports and journals to describe the ‘settling’ of the Americas.
We need to think carefully about Hinduism today. On the one hand, we have the Hindutvavadis who fabricate a whimsical, fantastic, malignant history of Hinduism. On the other, we have the secularists (Left, modernist, developmentalist) who evade an engagement with the history of Hinduism as a difficult embarrassment best forgotten. What is the truth? Take for example swa-dharma in the Manu Dharmashastra, the dharma applicable to one’s social position.
This book is a rigorous ethnographic study of religious movements in contemporary India. The author has focused upon two faith-based movements, namely, the Svadhyaya and the Tablighi Jamaat. Anindita Chakrabarti had spent several years doing ethnographic research in Gujarat, Mumbai and Delhi. As a sociological study, it states its aims very clearly. It wants to create a dialogue between the broad sub-discipline of sociology of religion with the theories of social movements and collective action.
It is always a daunting task to review very lengthy books, and Ramachandra Guha’s latest offering, Gandhi: The Years That Changed The World, 1914-1948 (2018) is humongous by any standards. The book spans more than a thousand pages, and covers practically every month of Gandhi’s life in India after his return from South Africa in 1915 to his tragic assassination in 1948.