By presenting a new interpretation of Rabindranath Tagore’s English language writings, this book places the work of India’s greatest Nobel Prize winner and cultural icon in the context of imperial history and thereby bridges the gap between Tagore studies and imperial/postcolonial historiography. Using detailed archival research, the book charts the origins of Tagore’s ideas in Indian religious traditions and discusses the impact of early Indian nationalism on Tagore’s thinking. It offers a new interpretation of Tagore’s complex debates with Gandhi about the colonial encounter, Tagore’s provocative analysis of the impact of British imperialism in India and his questioning of nationalism as a pathway to authentic postcolonial freedom. The book also demonstrates how the man and his ideas were received and interpreted in Britain during his lifetime and how they have been sometimes misrepresented by nationalist historians and postcolonial theorists after Tagore’s death. An alternative interpretation based on an intellectual history approach, this book places Tagore’s sense of agency, his ideas and intentions within a broader historical framework. Offering an exciting critique of postcolonial theory from a historical perspective, it is a timely contribution in the wake of the 150th anniversary of Tagore's birth in 2011.

Moving away from orthodox narratives of the Raj and British presence in India, this book examines the significance of the networks and connections that South Asians established on British soil. Looking at the period 1858-1950, it presents readings of cultural history and points to the urgent need to open up the parameters of this field of study.

The Economics of Empire: Genealogies of Capital and the Colonial Encounter is a multidisciplinary intervention into postcolonial theory that constructs and theorizes a political economy of empire. This comprehensive collection traces the financial genealogies associated with the colonial enterprise, the strategies of economic precarity, the pedigrees of capital, and the narratives of exploitation that underlay and determined the course of modern history. One of the first attempts to take this approach in postcolonial studies, the book seeks to sketch the commensal relation—a symbiotic "phoresy"—between capitalism and colonialism, reading them as linked structures that carried and sustained each other through and across the modern era. The scholars represented here are all postcolonial critics working in a range of disciplines, including Political Science, Sociology, History, Peace and Conflict Studies, Legal Studies, and Literary Criticism, exploring the connections between empire and capital, and the historical and political implications of that structural hinge. Each author engages existing postcolonial and poststructuralist theory and criticism while bridging it over to research and analytic lenses less frequently engaged by postcolonial critics. In so doing, they devise novel intersectional and interdisciplinary frameworks through which to produce more greatly nuanced understandings of imperialism, capitalism, and their inextricable relation, "new" postcolonial critiques of empire for the twenty-first century. This book will be an excellent resource for students and researchers of Postcolonial Studies, Literature, History, Sociology, Economics, Political Science and International Studies, among others.

A surprising, gripping narrative depicting the thinkers whose ideas shaped contemporary China, India, and the Muslim world A little more than a century ago, as the Japanese navy annihilated the giant Russian one at the Battle of Tsushima, original thinkers across Asia, working independently, sought to frame a distinctly Asian intellectual tradition that would inform and inspire the continent's anticipated rise to dominance. Asian dominance did not come to pass, and those thinkers—Tagore, Gandhi, and later Nehru in India; Liang Qichao and Sun Yatsen in China; Jamal al-Din al-Afghani and Abdurreshi al Ibrahim in the ruins of the Ottoman Empire—are seen as outriders from the main anticolonial tradition. But Pankaj Mishra shows that it was otherwise in this stereotype-shattering book. His enthralling group portrait of like minds scattered across a vast continent makes clear that modern Asia's revolt against the West is not the one led by faith-fired terrorists and thwarted peasants but one with deep roots in the work of thinkers who devised a view of life that was neither modern nor antimodern, neither colonialist nor anticolonialist. In broad, deep, dramatic chapters, Mishra tells the stories of these figures, unpacks their philosophies, and reveals their shared goal of a greater Asia. Right now, when the emergence of a greater Asia seems possible as at no previous time in history, From the Ruins of Empire is as necessary as it is timely—a book essential to our understanding of the world and our place in it.

Looking at decolonization in the conditional tense, this volume teases out the complex and uncertain ends of British and French empire in Africa during the period of ‘late colonial shift’ after 1945. Rather than view decolonization as an inevitable process, the contributors together explore the crucial historical moments in which change was negotiated, compromises were made, and debates were staged. Three core themes guide the analysis: development, contingency and entanglement. The chapters consider the ways in which decolonization was governed and moderated by concerns about development and profit. A complementary focus on contingency allows deeper consideration of how colonial powers planned for ‘colonial futures’, and how divergent voices greeted the end of empire. Thinking about entanglements likewise stresses both the connections that existed between the British and French empires in Africa, and those that endured beyond the formal transfer of power.

Citizens of Everywhere traces the international careers of a cohort of extraordinary Indian women leaders during the final decades of colonial rule. Working in pursuit of the dual goals of Indian independence and women's rights, the women featured in this book established productive transnational connections to gain influence on the world stage, all against the backdrop of momentous events in India and beyond. In doing so, they contributed a distinct set of ideas to global conversations about rights and citizenship. By bringing this transnational activism to light, the author offers new perspectives on Indian nationalism. More broadly the book establishes Indian women as actors in the global histories of women's rights and international movements during the era of decolonisation.

Beyond English: World Literature and India radically alters the debates on world literature that hinge on the model of circulation and global capital by deeply engaging with the idea of the world and world-making in South Asia. Tiwari argues that Indic words for world (vishva, jagat, sansar) offer a nuanced understanding of world literature that is antithetical to a commodified and standardized monolingual globe. She develops a comparative study of the concept of “world literature” (vishva sahitya) in Rabindranath Tagore's works, the desire for a new world in the lyrics of the Hindi shadowism (chhayavaad) poets, and world-making in Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai's Chemmeen (1956) and Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things (1997). By emphasizing the centrality of “literature” (sahitya) through a close reading of texts, Tiwari orients world literature toward comparative literature and comparative literature toward a worldliness that is receptive to the poetics of a world in its original language and in translation.

This is a comparative exploration of two iconic Nobel Prize winning writers, W.B. Yeats and Rabindranath Tagore, focusing on the theme of postcolonial translation, politics of friendship, decolonializing art and Irish-Indian nationalism through poetry and literature.

Indian Arrivals 1870-1915: Networks of British Empire examines how at the height of empire Britain was threaded through with Indian influences and ideas, in spite of colonial divisions. Throughout, the study is motivated by the notion that Indian travellers learned from the friendships they made in the west but also that they contributed to the development of a late Victorian cosmopolitanism of which they were an intrinsic part. Tracing the intricateencounters that took place between 'arriving' Indians and their British hosts, often through the medium of literature and journalism, the book paints a more textured picture than has been available to date ofcross-cultural contact between Indians and Britons and in so doing explores the myriad ways in which the centre of the nineteenth-century imperial world was criss-crossed by its margins, just as the margins were by the centre. Indian Arrivals offers a sustained reflection on what it is to arrive in another culture, in all senses of the word.

The contributions in Nationalism and the Postcolonial examine forms, representations, and consequences of ubiquitous nationalisms in languages, popular culture, and literature across the globe from the perspectives of linguistics, political science, cultural studies, and literary studies.