Changing Homelands: Hindu Politics and the Partition of India - Couverture rigide

Nair, Neeti

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 0674057791 ISBN 13 : 9780674057791

Editeur : Harvard University Press, 2011

Synopsis

Hindu Politics and the Partition of India

A propos du livre

Revue de presse :

The well-researched study, providing a wealth of information drawn from a wide variety of sources, serves more than a purely academic purpose. It gives the lay reader a clearer understanding of the subcontinent's history in its crucial phase, the part of history that continues to be distorted by diverse groups of holy crusaders.
--J. Sri Raman --The Hindu

Neeti Nair's Changing Homelands: Hindu Politics and the Partition of India raises the pivotal question of Punjabi Hindus who, being "suddenly" rendered a minority in their land, had to migrate to what became/remained India. The case of the Punjabi Hindus is atypical--they were minority Hindus in Muslim-majority Punjab, who had to migrate to become part of a majoritarian Hindu community in India. In India today, where Muslims constitute the major minority, it is hard to imagine Hindus as a minority. The book can help us imagine, across time, the fate of such a large minoritarian Punjabi Hinduism. This is historically significant as the present state of minority Hinduism in Pakistan (chiefly in Sindh) is too miniscule to provide a useful comparative point of analysis. Nair's book helps sensitize us to the enormous contingency of majority and minority formation--and perhaps no question is more significant for South Asian polities today...Nair's book demonstrates the compound causal assemblages and nexuses that led to Partition rather than the teleology of "communalism"--and the chief value of this type of analysis might lie in the fact that the identified political elements can then be meaningfully re-assembled in a way that can moderate conflict, guilt and misunderstanding in the present.
--Nikhil Govind
--India International Centre Quarterly

Changing Homelands challenges the conventional understanding on the political causes leading to division of a nation into two...[Nair's] account is to a large extent groundbreaking and adds a new perspective to the existing discourse on India's partition. There is an underlying inquisitiveness embedded throughout this exhaustive account for which the author deserves critical appreciation...The author's arguments are imposing and sure to draw attention. Her language is clear and engaging and her bibliography offers a rich assortment including several primary documents which authenticate the narrative and further value the overall broader arguments.
--Priyanka Singh
--Canadian Journal of History

As a history of activities of the Hindus in the Punjab, this book is a useful addition to understanding the history of the Punjab.
-- R.D. Lang
--Choice

Présentation de l'éditeur :

Changing Homelands offers a startling new perspective on what was and was not politically possible in late colonial India. In this highly readable account of the partition in the Punjab, Neeti Nair rejects the idea that essential differences between the Hindu and Muslim communities made political settlement impossible. Far from being an inevitable solution, the idea of partition was a very late, stunning surprise to the majority of Hindus in the region. In tracing the political and social history of the Punjab from the early years of the twentieth century, Nair overturns the entrenched view that Muslims were responsible for the partition of India. Some powerful Punjabi Hindus also preferred partition and contributed to its adoption. Almost no one, however, foresaw the deaths and devastation that would follow in its wake. Though much has been written on the politics of the Muslim and Sikh communities in the Punjab, Nair is the first historian to focus on the Hindu minority, both before and long after the divide of 1947. She engages with politics in post-Partition India by drawing from oral histories that reveal the complex relationship between memory and history--a relationship that continues to inform politics between India and Pakistan.

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: Harvard University Press
• Date d'édition: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0674057791
• ISBN 13: 9780674057791
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 356