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On 26th January 1950 India became a republic, shedding its last
links with its colonial past and inaugurating a new era of liberty
and freedom. With fundamental rights and civil liberties guaranteed
by the state, the new constitution was universally acclaimed as the
‘world’s greatest experiment in liberal government’. This
idealistic birth of a new republic meant a clean break with a
repressive past. And yet, barely twelve months later, the very
makers of the constitution were denouncing their own creation.
Passed in June 1951, the First Amendment to the Constitution was a
pivotal moment in Indian constitutional history. Sixteen Stormy
Days explores the contentious legacy of this First Amendment which
drastically curbed freedom of speech, restricted freedom against
discrimination and circumscribed the right to property. It follows
the sixteen days of debate that led up to it, the people that
created it, the great battle waged against it and the immense
consequences it has had for Indian democracy. It is a cautionary
tale about an almost forgotten but hugely consequential piece of
history that holds the key to understanding the position of civil
liberties and individual freedoms in India today. It challenges
conventional wisdom on iconic figures such as Jawaharlal Nehru,
B.R. Ambedkar, Rajendra Prasad, Sardar Patel and Shyama Prasad
Mookerji, and lays bare the vast gulf between the liberal promise
of India’s Constitution and the authoritarian impulses of her
first government.
'An important contribution ... Delving lucidly into the most
significant ideological battles of the era, this book deftly
outlines the thinking and dialogue that laid the foundations of the
Republic - and which remain deeply relevant and contentious today'
Shashi Tharoor, author of Inglorious Empire A history of Nehru that
dives deep into the debates of his era to understand his ideology -
and that of his contemporaries and opponents, asking what India
would look like had another bold young mind with fiercely held
views led during the country's formative years of independence.
Sixty years after the death of Jawaharal Nehru, the independence
activist and first prime minister of India continues to be deified
and vilified in equal measure. And still in contemporary political
debate, the ideological spectrum remains defined by the degree of
divergence from Nehru's ideas. With the Nehruvian ideals
increasingly juxtaposed against the positions of Nehru's erstwhile
contemporaries and questions asked about what might have happened
on the Indian subcontinent had another hero of that era taken
leadership, this book explores his encounters with key
contemporaries to excavate and evaluate the views that were in
circulation. It examines the founder of Pakistan Mohammad Ali
Jinnah and his cause of Hindu-Muslim unity, Shyama Prasad Mookerjee
of the Hindu Mahasabha and his fierce defence of the constitution,
the Congress leader Sardar Patel, with whom Nehru often disagreed
about the threat of China, and Mohammad Iqbal, the poet and
politician whose letters on Muslim solidarity were often issued
from a prison cell. The correspondence and interactions that Nehru
had with these key personalities captures the essence of how
post-independent India was projected as a nation, and the early
directions it took towards self-definition.
'An important contribution ... Delving lucidly into the most
significant ideological battles of the era, this book deftly
outlines the thinking and dialogue that laid the foundations of the
Republic - and which remain deeply relevant and contentious today'
Shashi Tharoor, author of Inglorious Empire A history of Nehru that
dives deep into the debates of his era to understand his ideology -
and that of his contemporaries and opponents, asking what India
would look like had another bold young mind with fiercely held
views led during the country's formative years of independence.
Sixty years after the death of Jawaharal Nehru, the independence
activist and first prime minister of India continues to be deified
and vilified in equal measure. And still in contemporary political
debate, the ideological spectrum remains defined by the degree of
divergence from Nehru's ideas. With the Nehruvian ideals
increasingly juxtaposed against the positions of Nehru's erstwhile
contemporaries and questions asked about what might have happened
on the Indian subcontinent had another hero of that era taken
leadership, this book explores his encounters with key
contemporaries to excavate and evaluate the views that were in
circulation. It examines the founder of Pakistan Mohammad Ali
Jinnah and his cause of Hindu-Muslim unity, Shyama Prasad Mookerjee
of the Hindu Mahasabha and his fierce defence of the constitution,
the Congress leader Sardar Patel, with whom Nehru often disagreed
about the threat of China, and Mohammad Iqbal, the poet and
politician whose letters on Muslim solidarity were often issued
from a prison cell. The correspondence and interactions that Nehru
had with these key personalities captures the essence of how
post-independent India was projected as a nation, and the early
directions it took towards self-definition.
Imperial Sovereignty and Local Politics takes at its focus the
historically significant interconnections between local polities
and imperial formations in South Asia. Using the relationship
between the Bhadauria Rajputs and the Mughal, Maratha and British
Empires as a prism to evaluate the constitution of sovereignty and
the process of state formation, it demonstrates the enduring
relevance of symbolism and ritual, the persistence of pre-colonial
political forms and ideologies and the continuing importance of
local power networks in moulding imperial projects. Employing
theories of state formation borrowed from anthropology, Singh
emphasizes the need to conceptually separate political authority
from symbolic sovereignty and examine the local context of imperial
politics. This work provides a compelling re-orientation of the way
we understand the nature of imperial states, the experience of
sovereignty and the processes of political change in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries.
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