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Book Review: From Plassey to Partition and After by Sekhar Bandyopadhyay

02 Thursday Feb 2017

Posted by rajatu in Book Reviews, History, Uncategorized

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Book Review, Books, Freedom Struggle, Gandhi, history, India, Indian History, Modern India

From Plassey to Partition and After: A History of Modern IndiaFrom Plassey to Partition and After: A History of Modern India by Sekhar Bandyopadhyay
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

‘From Plassey to Partition and After’ is that rare unbiased book on modern India. Objective and comprehensive, it is the one and only book you need to read to grasp the complex contours of modern Indian history. What distinguishes it from other books is that the author Sekhar Bandyopadhyay is careful to treat modern Indian history as a site of intense contestation. He doesn’t thrust a particular narrative in your face, like Bipan Chandra pushes his Marxist nationalistic narrative of India’s freedom struggle in India’s Struggle for Independence. Rather, Bandyopadhyay recognizes that freedom meant different things for different socio-economic groups and furnishes a well-researched summary of various historiographical strands.

He also incorporates recent academic work on economic history and explains modern political developments in the context of material conditions, marking an illuminating shift from the usual personality & ideology centric approach to historical events. For instance, he writes that Pakistan was presented as a ‘peasant utopia’ to the peasants of East Bengal, which would liberate the Muslim peasantry from the hands of Hindu zamindars and moneylenders, thus representing a break from existing agrarian relations. He also writes about the balancing act Congress had to perform between indigenous capitalists and the working class. He writes that working class support for the Congress was, in general, weak – industrial workers in Bombay had meanwhile thrown in their lot with the Communists – with the exception of Bengal where their fight was against the British capitalists.

He also writes about how caste relations played a role in the success of Congress-led mass movements. In general, many 19th century peasant movements with a significant element of self-initiative were co-opted into the Non Cooperation Movement. Regions with no pre-history of peasant mobilization remained quiet during so-called ‘national’ movements. And regions with long-standing resentments often spiraled out of the hands of Congress leaders and turned violent. The movement was controlled and successful primarily in the region where dominant peasant communities such as the Mahishya caste in Bengal and Patidars in Gujarat held sway over lower caste agricultural labourers. Regions with more cross-caste mobilization, such as Awadh, tended to turn violent.

The book is a scholarly achievement, a task made all the more difficult by the proximity of the period under study. The only thing this book needs are some section headings between the relentless paragraphs. This will help the reader mentally categorize the various crisscrossing strands and combine them to harvest an accessible account of this complex period. This quibble aside, From Plassey to Partition is easily the most enlightening book on modern India I’ve read. Highly recommended!

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The Age of Rockstars

20 Wednesday Apr 2016

Posted by rajatu in Uncategorized

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music, random, rockstars, technology

The old gods are dead. The new idols of liberal, democratic techno-capitalism are ‘rockstars’, to use a tellingly overused term.

They are aspirational deities, Schrodinger’s cats who’re simultaneously anti-establishment and of the establishment: people elevated by the (social) media into perfect, endearingly flawed demigods to fulfill our Enlightenment-era tendency to venerate individual genius.

Rockstars can now be found in almost every conceivable field (except those involving manual labour): Justin Trudeau, the rockstar politician; Elon Musk, the rockstar technologist; Steve Jobs, the rockstar businessman & visionary; Neil Gaiman, the literary rockstar.

We have start-ups falling over each other to hire rockstar software developers. Hell, we even have a rockstar RBI governor, arguably one of the most unsexiest jobs around before the advent of the articulate, stylishly bespectacled Raghuram Rajan.

If anything, the fact that ‘rockstar’ is now used to deify politicians, technologists, entrepreneurs, programmers and writers, everybody but musicians, is proof that while rock music may be commercially dead, its erstwhile practitioners still set the benchmark for fanatic devotion.

Movie Review: Fandry (2014) by Nagraj Manjule

17 Wednesday Feb 2016

Posted by rajatu in Movies, Uncategorized

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Caste, discrimination, marathi, Movies, social justice

Fandry

Fandry (2014) is the sensitive portrayal of a 13-year-old Dalit boy infatuated with an upper-caste girl

Fandry: a searing indictment of caste in modern India

In a society obsessed with notions of purity and pollution, pigs occupy a special position of filth. Deriving its name from this creature at the very bottom of the animal hierarchy, Fandry (slur for wild pig), a Marathi drama, is a scorching critique of the casual casteism that pervades post-modern India, discrimination that’s often hidden in plain sight. Continue reading →

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