Communism and Nationalism in Colonial India, 1939-45 is an incisive and original contribution to our understanding of the Communist Party of India`s approach towards the Indian national movement and British colonialism from 1939 to 1945. Based on extensive use of archival material, private papers and rare documents, the book is a critique of both the official CPI line as well as its detractors` opinions about the Party`s role in the said period. It analyses in detail both points of view with regard to why the CPI failed to expose what it termed as the `betrayal` of the `bourgeois nationalist` leadership and why it was not able to establish its `hegemony` over the Indian freedom struggle-to transform the bourgeois democratic revolution into a socialist revolution. This book can be used both as a textbook as well as a supplementary reading material by students, researchers and academicians working in the fields of Political Science, Economics, Sociology and History. It is an invaluable resource for all those interested in the study of the inter-play of communist, nationalist and imperialist forces during the Second World War, including political parties and civil society organizations.

Raza traces the anti-colonial struggles of Indian revolutionaries in the context of Communist Internationalism during the last decades of the British Raj.

In this book Michele L. Louro compiles the debates, introduces the personalities, and reveals the ideas that seeded Jawaharlal Nehru's political vision for India and the wider world. Set between the world wars, this book argues that Nehru's politics reached beyond India in order to fulfill a greater vision of internationalism that was rooted in his experiences with anti-imperialist and anti-fascist mobilizations in the 1920s and 1930s. Using archival sources from India, the United States, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Germany, and Russia, the author offers a compelling study of Nehru's internationalism as well as contributes a necessary interwar history of institutions and networks that were confronting imperialist, capitalist, and fascist hegemony in the twentieth-century world. Louro provides readers with a global intellectual history of anti-imperialism and Nehru's appropriation of it, while also establishing a history of a typically overlooked period.

This volume is a theoretico-empirical study of nations and nationalism on a global scale. It enquires if the idea of the nation, by its own logic, is feasible and whether India fulfils the requirement of nationhood with a reasonable prospect of survival. The monograph engages with the theories of nation and nationalism and examines if they are relevant and tenable in contemporary times. It looks at the way these ideas have acted out in the Indian nation while attempting to map its future trajectory. It also asks: how do the two fundamental challenges to the idea of nation – ethnicity and class – fare in the era of globalisation; and further, how does India, a new state in an ancient society, reconceptualise the paradigm of this debate? The book will be of great interest to scholars and students of political science, political theory, history, political philosophy, and South Asian studies, as well as informed general readers.

“The Mahatma Misunderstood” studies the relationship between the production of novels in late-colonial India and nationalist agitation promoted by the Indian National Congress. The volume examines the process by which novelists who were critically engaged with Gandhian nationalism, and who saw both the potentials and the pitfalls of Gandhian political strategies, came to be seen as the Mahatma’s standard-bearers rather than his loyal opposition.

This book explores the aesthetic forms of the political left across the borders of post-colonial, post-partition South Asia. Spanning India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan and Bangladesh, the contributors study art, film, literature, poetry and cultural discourse to illuminate the ways in which political commitment has been given aesthetic form and artistic value by artists and by cultural and political activists in postcolonial South Asia. With a focused conceptualization this volume asks: Does the political left in South Asia have a recognizable aesthetic form? And if so, what political effects do left-wing artistic movements and aesthetic artefacts have in shaping movements against inequality and injustice? Reframing political aesthetics within a postcolonial and decolonised framework, the contributors detail the trajectories and transformations of left-wing cultural formations and affiliations and focus on connections and continuities across post-1947/8 India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh.