Search results
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.
Federation and a self-conscious West Indian identity. If Barbados, as a colonial state, were to be viable, it required a society to stabilise it and art and culture to provide its moral compass. The British Council, in its submission to the West India Royal Commission, provided its own twist to what, in its view, had caused the riots and what solutions could be put forward. ‘Having
This chapter focuses on the history of India. It explores the roots of Indian identity and discusses how the Indian civilisation was influenced by various processes such as foreign invasions, foreign trade and cultural imperialism. This chapter suggests that these processes have forged links between Indian and other societies and explains that these links are being emphasized by both the Indian government and the media in this age of globalisation.
This book is a study of mobility, image and identity in colonial India and imperial Britain in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is a model for studies of migrant figures like K.S. Ranjitsinhji who emerged during the imperial period. Ranjitsinhji is an important figure in the history of modern India and the British empire because he was recognized as a great athlete and described as such. The book focuses on four aspects of Ranjitsinhji's life as a colonial subject: race, money, loyalty and gender. It touches upon Ranjitsinhji's career as a cricketer in the race section. The issue of money gave Indian critics of Ranjitsinhji's regime the language they needed to condemn his personal and administrative priorities, and to portray him as self-indulgent. Ranjitsinhji lived his life as a player of multiple gender roles: sometimes serially, and on occasion simultaneously. His status as a "prince" - while not entirely fake - was fragile enough to be unreliable, and he worked hard to reinforce it even as he constructed his Englishness. Any Indian attempt to transcend race, culture, climate and political place by imitating an English institution and its product must be an unnatural act of insurgency. The disdain for colonial politics that was manifest in the "small rebellions" at the end of the world war converged with the colonized/Indian identity that was evident at the League of Nations. Between the war and his death, it is clear, Ranjitsinhji moved to maximize his autonomy in Nawanagar.
For C. L. R. James West Indian identity was something to be celebrated, associated as it was for him, with the whole of the Caribbean, from Cuba and Haiti to Martinique, Trinidad and Jamaica. 1 Its distinctive character he saw as intimately linked to its particularly modern history, with the plantation at the centre of a global capitalist system linking slavery with
At a time when monolingualist claims for the importance of ‘speaking English’ to the national order continue louder than ever, even as language diversity is increasingly part of contemporary British life, literature becomes a space to consider the terms of linguistic belonging. Bad English examines writers including Tom Leonard, James Kelman, Suhayl Saadi, Raman Mundair, Daljit Nagra, Xiaolu Guo, Leila Aboulela, Brian Chikwava, and Caroline Bergvall, who engage multilingually, experimentally, playfully, and ambivalently with English’s power. Considering their invented vernaculars and mixed idioms, their dramatised scenes of languaging – languages learned or lost, acts of translation, scenes of speaking, the exposure and racialised visibility of accent – it argues for a growing field of contemporary literature in Britain pre-eminently concerned with language’s power dynamics, its aesthetic potentialities, and its prosthetic strangeness. Drawing on insights from applied linguistics and translation studies as well as literary scholarship, Bad English explores contemporary arguments about language in Britain – in debates about citizenship or education, in the media or on Twitter, in Home Office policy and asylum legislation – as well as the ways they are taken up in literature. It uncovers both an antagonistic and a productive interplay between language politics and literary form, tracing writers’ articulation of linguistic alienation and ambivalence, as well as the productivity and making-new of radical language practices. Doing so, it refutes the view that language difference and language politics are somehow irrelevant to contemporary Britain and instead argues for their constitutive centrality to the work of novelists and poets whose inside/outside relationship to English in its institutionalised forms is the generative force of their writing.
The looking machine calls for the redemption of documentary cinema, exploring the potential and promise of the genre at a time when it appears under increasing threat from reality television, historical re-enactments, designer packaging and corporate authorship. The book consists of a set of essays, each focused on a particular theme derived from the author’s own experience as a filmmaker. It provides a practice-based, critical perspective on the history of documentary, how films evoke space, time and physical sensations, questions of aesthetics, and the intellectual and emotional relationships between filmmakers and their subjects. It is especially concerned with the potential of film to broaden the base of human knowledge, distinct from its expression in written texts. Among its underlying concerns are the political and ethical implications of how films are actually made, and the constraints that may prevent filmmakers from honestly showing what they have seen. While defending the importance of the documentary idea, MacDougall urges us to consider how the form can become a ‘cinema of consciousness’ that more accurately represents the sensory and everyday aspects of human life. Building on his experience bridging anthropology and cinema, he argues that this means resisting the inherent ethnocentrism of both our own society and the societies we film.
characteristics were, unsurprisingly, defined and intensified by perceived differences from an Indian identity. Yet, Indian otherness in relation to a fully formed English national identity was, up until recent reconsiderations in Indo-Anglian fiction, described in terms of rootlessness, fragmentation and alienation. Which is to say that under the Raj the English were partly comforted in their psychical and physical alienation by metaphysical assertions on the historical and national homelessness of Indians. A common opinion has also been that, post-Independence, the British
led to the growth of national consciousness. As Bose and Jalal assert, ‘anticolonialism can be seen now to have been a much more variegated phenomenon than simply the articulate dissent of educated urban groups imbued with western concepts of liberalism and nationalism’ (Bose and Jalal, 1998: 107). Nevertheless, underlying the nationalist movement was an Indian identity that had taken shape faced with colonial rule and exploitation. It formed the basis of a national identity. The British Indian state introduced territorial borders that coincided with the boundaries
subcontinent, and when Jawaharlal Nehru, as head of the transitional Indian government projected himself as global leader of a resurgent ‘Asianism’ and anti-colonialism, the 1947 visit posed unsettling questions about South African Indian identity, senses of belonging, and loyalty. 9 South Asian loyalism and imperial monarchy in South Africa After months of anxiety about the possibilities of an embarrassing