It was hot at Padachina even for a summer day. In this village were many houses, but not a soul could be seen anywhere. The bazaar was full of shops and the lanes were lined with houses built either of brick or of mud. Every house was quiet. The shops were closed, and no one knew where the shopkeepers had gone. Even the street beggars were absent. The weavers wove no more. The merchants had no business. Philanthropic persons had nothing to give. Teachers closed their schools. Things had come to such a pass that children were even afraid to cry. The streets were empty. There were no bathers in the river. There were no human beings about the houses, no birds in the trees, no cattle in the pastures. Jackals and dogs morosely prowled in the graveyards and in the cremation grounds. One great house stood in this village. Its colossal pillars could be seen from a distance. But its doors were closed so tight that it was almost impossible for even a breath of air to enter. Within the house a man and his wife sat deeply absorbed in thought. Mahendra Singh and his wife were face to face with famine. The year before the harvests had been below normal. So rice was expensive this year and people began to suffer. Then during the rainy season it rained plentifully. The villagers at first looked upon this as a special mercy of God. Cowherds sang in joy, and the wives of the peasants began to pester their husbands for silver ornaments. All of a sudden, God frowned again. Not a drop of rain fell during the remaining months of the season. The rice fields dried into heaps of straw. Here and there a few fields yielded poor crops, but government agents bought these up for the army. So people began to starve again. At first they lived on one meal a day. Soon, even that became scarce, and they began to go without any food at all. The crop was too scanty, but the government revenue collector sought to advance his personal prestige by increasing the land revenue by ten per cent. And in dire misery Bengal shed bitter tears. Beggars increased in such numbers that charity soon became the most difficult thing to practise. Then disease began to spread. Farmers sold their cattle and their ploughs and ate up the seed grain. Then they sold their homes and farms. For lack of food they soon took to eating leaves of trees, then grass and when the grass was gone they ate weeds. People of certain castes began to eat cats, dogs and rats.

Paying particular attention to the representation of women and to gendered notions of the nation, this book examines for the first time the marked parallels between Rushdie's critique of the Nehruvian legacy and the most significant recent trends in Indian historiography, especially the feminist and subalternist movements.

Anandmath is an extraordinary political novel. The plot, with its epical dimensions, is based on the sanyasi rebellion in Bengal in the late 18th century. The sanyasis fought the British against all odds, whom they regarded as an arch enemy of the country, and responsible for the terrible famine of 1772. In this novel Bankim also wrote Bande Mataram - Hail Motherland - and gave India its first national song, which later became a rallying call of the national freedom movement.

The book illuminates the spatial utopianism of South Asian anti-colonial texts by showing how they refuse colonial spatial imaginaries to re-imagine the British Indian colony as the postcolony in diverse and contested ways. Focusing on the literary field of South Asia between, largely, the 1860s and 1920s, it underlines the centrality of literary imagination and representation in the cultural politics of decolonization. This book spatializes our understanding of decolonization while decoupling and complicating the easy equation between decolonization and anti-colonial nationalism. The author utilises a global comparative framework and reads across the English-vernacular divide to understand space as a site of contested representation and ideological contestation. He interrogates the spatial desire of anti-colonial and colonial texts across a range of genres, namely, historical romances, novels, travelogues, memoirs, poems, and patriotic lyrics. The book is the first full-length literary geographical study of South Asian literary texts and will be of interest to an interdisciplinary audience in the fields of Postcolonial and World Literature, Asian Literature, Victorian Literature, Modern South Asian Historiography, Literature and Utopia, Literature and Decolonization, Literature and Nationalism, Cultural Geography, and South Asian Studies.

This book sheds new light on the dynamics of the colonial encounter between Britain and India. It highlights how various analytical approaches to this encounter can be creatively mobilised to rethink entanglements of memory and identity emerging from British rule in the subcontinent. This volume reevaluates central, long-standing debates about the historical impact of the British Raj by deviating from hegemonic and top-down civilizational perspectives. It focuses on interactions, relations and underlying meanings of the colonial experience. The narratives of memory, identity and the legacy of the colonial encounter are woven together in a diverse range of essays on subjects such as colonial and nationalist memorials; British, Eurasian, Dalit and Adivasi identities; regional political configurations; and state initiatives and patterns of control. By drawing on empirically rich, regional and chronological historical studies, this book will be essential reading for students and researchers of history, political science, colonial studies, cultural studies and South Asian studies.

Winner of the A.K. Ramanujan Prize for Annotated Translation This is a translation of a historically important Bengali novel. Published in 1882, Chatterji's Anandamath helped create the atmosphere and the symbolism for the nationalist movement leading to Indian independence in 1947. It contains the famous hymn Vande Mataram ("I revere the Mother"), which has become India's official National Song. Set in Bengal at the time of the famine of 1770, the novel reflects tensions and oppositions within Indian culture between Hindus and Muslims, ruler and ruled, indigenous people and foreign overlords, jungle and town, Aryan and non-Aryan, celibacy and sexuality. It is both a political and a religious work. By recreating the past of Bengal, Chatterji hoped to create a new present that involved a new interpretation of the past. Julius Lipner not only provides the first complete and satisfactory English translation of this important work, but supplies an extensive Introduction contextualizing the novel and its cultural and political history. Also included are notes offering the Bengali or Sanskrit terms for certain words, as well as explanatory notes for the specialized lay reader or scholar.