This book is regarded as a personal manifesto, a statement through the history of partition and its aftermath, of the values which India's Muslims should cherish and of the national priorities they should promote. It provides the reference-point for understanding India's Partition and its legacy.

This book is regarded as a personal manifesto, a statement through the history of partition and its aftermath, of the values which India's Muslims should cherish and of the national priorities they should promote. It provides the reference-point for understanding India's Partition and its legacy.

The success of Indian secularism lies in the ways in which its minorities have lived and negotiated their existence with the State and the broader society at large. Yet it remains painfully true that over the past decade, the story of Indian Muslims has been circumscribed by the broader Hindutva agenda. An assessment of the future of Indian Muslims must necessarily be read within the context of the rise militant Hindu nationalist politics and its impact on the secular fabric of the country. Hindu-Muslim unity, the defining moment of Indian secularism has come under renewed threat. The present volume tries to map the tensions and predicaments of Indian Muslims arising as a result of that threat. The papers included here study the ways in which Hindu Right forces such as the RSS and the Bajrang Dal view the Muslims and in a certain sense construct them. Does the rise of Hindutva necessarily force the Muslims towards alienation or is there a section, which looks at the BJP differently? How does the stress on Indian pluralism translate in terms of Muslims' relationship with the State? What has been the response of the State to such demands? The volume also brings into focus ways in which Muslims themselves make their life meaningful; whether through investing in education or even a change in terms of practising their own religion or the way they have historically related to other political formations. It is at the three interrelated levels of the state, politics and society that the present volume charts out the issues of Muslims and the multifarious ways in which they live and give meaning to Indian secularism.

Millions in India have long been obsessed with the vicissitudes of the Nehru-Gandhi family's fate. Inextricably linked to the ups and downs of their lives was the future of the nation itself. It was Jawaharlal Nehru's leadership that guided India onto the world stage as a modern nation. Despite the varied scholarship of Nehruvian studies, one important aspect-the experiences of the Nehrus in prison during the national movement-has received only scant consideration. This book addresses that omission by highlighting the significance of prison time in shaping the lives of the members of this illustrious family. For Motilal and Jawaharlal Nehru, Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, and Krishna Hutheesing, among others, serving prison time was much more than just a marker of participation in the Independence movement. The grim walls of jail provided the place and time to the Nehrus to reflect on and give direction to the nationalist struggle. Such important literary works as Glimpses of World History and Discovery of India, which remain timeless in their appeal, were crafted in gaol. In tracing the intellectual biography of the Nehru-Gandhi family, this book documents the ethos of an entire era during the colonial period.

This book unfolds the recent history of over one hundred million Muslims living in India, details their fears and anxieties, delineates their main currents of thought and examines their responses to the socio-economic processes affecting the country as a whole. Legacy of a Divided Nation begins by describing the specific features of Indian Islam, the reconstruction of a specifically Muslim identity by the British and its legitimisation by the Indian nationalist movement, all of which are crucial in understanding the roots of India's Partition. Issues relating to the identity, integration and 'minority appeasement' of Indian Muslims are analysed within the wider context of Hindu-Muslim relations in the colonial period and in the secular trajectory plotted by lndia since l947. The effect of economic, legal and social change on the Muslim population also features strongly in the work, as do its patterns of political and religious allegiance and responses to the wave of anti-Muslim sentiment unleashed by India's Hindu nationalists, notably the BJP.

This book examines the history of prison and prisoners in colonial India. Based on substantial archival research, it presents the conditions of the prisoners, their vision for the freedom movement and the various aspects of prisons in the subcontinent. By focusing on the lives and motivations of select prisoners, it places their lived experiences within the larger rubric of Indian nationalism and explores the notions of the political, protest and resistance during the first half of the twentieth century. The work also deals with issues such as the differences between Indian and European prisons as well as the conception of criminal classes in the colony. It therefore fills in a gap area in modern Indian history and provides a historical context to the contemporary Indian prison system. It draws upon a wide range of sources including the records at the National Archives of India, private papers, native newspaper reports, memoirs, biographies, and autobiographies.