Most people believe India’s struggle for independence to have begun with Mahatma Gandhi. Little credit goes to the proof that this call for a mass movement did not arise out of a void. For the past century and more, historians have overlooked the phase of twenty-five years of intense creative endeavour preceding and preparing for the Mahatma’s advent. The reason for this systematic omission has been the fundamentally radical nature of the revolutionary programme put to practice by Indian leaders of late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Jugantar was diametrically distinct from the dream of non-violence floated by the Mahatma and the Congress. Very well documented with inputs from Indian, European and American archives, the present study carefully straightenes out the origins – philosophical, historical and religious and intellectual, so to say – of Indian nationalism. From Rammohun to Sri Aurobindo, passing through Marx and Tagore, the full set of ideological views has been analysed here. Unknown up to this day, the sustained focus in this volume on the outlook and the activities of these revolutionaries inside India and abroad brings home the ‘very sophisticated understanding of the contemporary political reality’ that made their leader Jatindranath Mukherjee, the ‘right hand man’ of Sri Aurobindo, the very emblem of an epoch and its aspirations. Please note: Taylor & Francis does not sell or distribute the Hardback in India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka

A major historian tells the dramatic and untold story of the shadowy networks of revolutionaries across Asia who laid the foundations in the early twentieth century for the end of European imperialism on their continent. This is the epic tale of how modern Asia emerged out of conflict between imperial powers and a global network of revolutionaries in the turbulent early decades of the twentieth century. In 1900, European empires had not yet reached their territorial zenith. But a new generation of Asian radicals had already planted the seeds of their destruction. They gained new energy and recruits after the First World War and especially the Bolshevik Revolution, which sparked utopian visions of a free and communist world order led by the peoples of Asia. Aided by the new technologies of cheap printing presses and international travel, they built clandestine webs of resistance from imperial capitals to the front lines of insurgency that stretched from Calcutta and Bombay to Batavia, Hanoi, and Shanghai. Tim Harper takes us into the heart of this shadowy world by following the interconnected lives of the most remarkable of these Marxists, anarchists, and nationalists, including the Bengali radical M. N. Roy, the iconic Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh, and the enigmatic Indonesian communist Tan Malaka. He recreates the extraordinary milieu of stowaways, false identities, secret codes, cheap firearms, and conspiracies in which they worked. He shows how they fought with subterfuge, violence, and persuasion, all the while struggling to stay one step ahead of imperial authorities. Undergound Asia shows for the first time how Asia’s national liberation movements crucially depended on global action. And it reveals how the consequences of the revolutionaries’ struggle, for better or worse, shape Asia’s destiny to this day.

An intervention in the field of dissenting writings by women political detainees in India in the 1970s, and it straddles three interlinked areas: politics, prison and writing. It focuses on writings arising out of Bengal's Naxalite movement (1967-1975) and from the pan-Indian period of Emergency (1975-1977).

Most people believe India's struggle for independence to have begun with Mahatma Gandhi. Little credit goes to the proof that this call for a mass movement did not arise out of a void. The present study with inputs from Indian, European and American archives, carefully straightens out the origins - philosophical, historical and religiou

" ... Documents the history and development of [Post-colonial literatures in English, together with English and American literature] and includes original research relating to the literatures of some 50 countries and territories. In more than 1,600 entries written by more than 600 internationally recognized scholars, it explores the effect of the colonial and post-colonial experience on literatures in English worldwide.

India in Africa, Africa in India traces the longstanding interaction between these two regions, showing that the Indian Ocean world provides many examples of cultural flows that belie our understanding of globalization as a recent phenomenon. This region has had, and continues to have, an internal integrity that touches the lives of its citizens in their commerce, their cultural exchanges, and their concepts of each other and of themselves in the world. These connections have deep historical roots, and their dynamics are not attributable solely to the effects of European colonialism, modernity, or contemporary globalization -- although these forces have left their mark. The contributors to this interdisciplinary volume come from the fields of history, literature, dance, sociology, gender studies, and religion, making this collection unique in its recreation of an entire world too seldom considered as such.