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This book looks at India in the context of a globalized world. It starts by looking at the history of Indian civilization, exploring the roots of Indian identity and highlighting processes such as foreign invasions, foreign trade, cultural imperialism, colonial rule and the growth of Indian nationalism. The founding fathers wanted India to be a liberal democracy and the values enshrined in the constitution were expected to form the basis of a society more in tune with the modern world. The book examines the gradual democratization of Indian politics. Cultural and ethnic divisions in Indian society are examined in depth, as are the problems that have prevented economic development and stood in the way of economic liberalization. The history of India's integration into the global economy is considered, and the opportunities available to the country in the early years of the twenty-first century are detailed. Alternative approaches to the development of the country, such as those put forward by Gandhi, are discussed, and the final chapters consider the Indian government's perception of the Indian diaspora, as well as the changing priorities reflected in India's foreign policy since 1947.
. 28 Mohanavelu, German Tamilology , pp. 12–27. 29 Spangenberg, An Account of the Manner, p. 268. 30 J.L. Reveal and J.S. Pringle, ‘Taxonomic botany and floristics’, in: Flora of North America north of Mexico, 1 ( 1993 ), 157–92. 31 Christopher S John, On Indian Civilization, or Report of a successful Experiment, Made during two years on that subject, In fifteen Tamul, and five English
local histories which came to form the basis of land tenure, assessment and revenue collection. Indian civilization itself was explored in historical perspective, usually within a teleological framework that validated British rule. And British rule was the subject of popular histories of specific events such as the Black Hole of Calcutta. Although the most complex
secular literature, at least among the educated classes. In contrast to other nineteenth-century accounts that took Hinduism as the essence of Indian civilization,28 atheists and freethinkers de-emphasized this religion, instead opting to note the rapid advance of science and freethought in the country. British and American newspapers reported on the distribution of freethought works in India and on how major figures in freethought, like Charles Bradlaugh, 120 The wise men of the East Charles Darwin, and John Stuart Mill, were all well known among educated Indians
hubristic perspective of an individual such as Mill, who ‘had no sympathy with Indian civilizations past or present’ (Rendall, 1982: 44). This distance, Javeer Majeed claims, is the result of Mill’s tandem objectives in HBI: to ‘ascertain the true state of the Hindus in the scale of civilization’ (Mill, 1840: 2.135), and more urgently to argue for the necessity of government reform in Britain (Majeed, 1992: 8–10). Although Mill is absent from the pages of Glimpses of Hidden India, Harkness does quote a passage from a study by one of his contemporaries in Modern Hyderabad
, millennia-old, innate attributes of a spatially singular Indian civilization. On the other hand, this extended epoch had witnessed uneven yet acute articulations of colonial urbanism, entailing debates on the content of tradition and formations of gender on the subcontinent, religious negotiations of evangelical encounters, nationalist contestations of colonial claims, and varied experiments with European
issues, (nonstate) actors, markets, communication, culture, legitimacy and postmodernity. On the other hand, Anthony Giddens (1990: 67) argues that ‘no state, however powerful, held as much sovereign control in practice as was enshrined in legal principle’. The history of the past two centuries is, therefore, not one of the progressive erosion of the sovereignty of the nation-state. This book looks at India in the context of a globalized world. Chapter 1 deals with the history of the Indian civilization. It explores the roots of Indian identity and highlights processes
were often influenced by wider formulations of interactions between “great” and “little” traditions, between processes of “universalization” and “parochialization.” 9 Held up by quasi-evolutionist schemas, these projections of an overarching Indian civilization unsteadily de-historicized the past and the present, principally rendering vacuous various grounded articulations of time and
. Banerjea holds, it is evident that Indians will have to make a supreme effort before they achieve an autonomous self-government by ridding their country of the foreign despotism which fools or knaves regard ‘as ordained in the inscrutable dispensation of Providence for India’s good’.62 Still further, he criticized ‘the puerile racial vanity of the English’63 that blinded colonists into treating a far older, and far more sophisticated, Indian civilization as inferior to their own. Behind the evident prejudice underlying the ‘civilizing mission’ lay the more cynical
members. Chandragupta’s grandson Ashoka (269–232 BC) was the greatest of the Mauryan kings. In the beginning he was an imperialist like all the other Mauryan kings, but after the Kalinga (modern Orissa) war he converted to ahimsa or nonviolence He patronized Buddhism and popularized the concept of dharma, which means ‘religion’ but can also mean duty, responsibility and law. He sent emissaries to Ceylon, Burma and Southeast Asia to convert people to Buddhism and through Buddhism to Mauryan pacification and Indian civilization. Between 250 and 240 BC Ashoka hosted the