This book profiles twentieth-century India through the life and times of Ramananda Chatterjee – journalist, influencer, nationalist. Through a reconstruction of his history, the book highlights the oft-forgotten role of media in the making of the idea of India. It shows how early twentieth-century colonial India was a curious melee of ideas and people – a time of rising nationalism, as well as an influx of Western ideas; of unprecedented violence and compelling non-violence; of press censorship and defiant journalism. It shows how Ramananda Chatterjee navigated this world and went beyond the traditional definition of the nation as an entity with fixed boundaries to anticipate Benedict Anderson and Ernest Gellner. The volume also examines the wide reach and scope of his journals in English, Hindi and Bengali, which published the likes of Rabindranath Tagore, Subhash Bose, Abanindranath Tagore, Nandalal Bose, Ananda Coomaraswamy, the scientist J. C. Bose and Zhu Deh, the co-founder of the Chinese Red Army. He also published India in Bondage by the American Unitarian minister J. T. Sunderland, which resulted in his arrest. An intriguing behind-the-scenes look of early twentieth-century colonial India, this book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of history, modern South Asia and media and cultural studies.

Delhi, one of the world's largest cities, has faced momentous challenges—mass migration, competing governing authorities, controversies over citizenship, and communal violence. To understand the contemporary plight of India's capital city, this book revisits one of the most dramatic episodes in its history, telling the story of how the city was remade by the twin events of partition and independence. Treating decolonization as a process that unfolded from the late 1930s into the mid-1950, Rotem Geva traces how India and Pakistan became increasingly territorialized in the imagination and practice of the city's residents, how violence and displacement were central to this process, and how tensions over belonging and citizenship lingered in the city and the nation. She also chronicles the struggle, after 1947, between the urge to democratize political life in the new republic and the authoritarian legacy of colonial rule, augmented by the imperative to maintain law and order in the face of the partition crisis. Drawing on a wide range of sources, Geva reveals the period from the late 1930s to the mid-1950s as a twilight time, combining features of imperial framework and independent republic. Geva places this liminality within the broader global context of the dissolution of multiethnic and multireligious empires into nation-states and argues for an understanding of state formation as a contest between various lines of power, charting the links between different levels of political struggle and mobilization during the churning early years of independence in Delhi.

This book profiles twentieth-century India through the life and times of Ramananda Chatterjee - journalist, influencer, nationalist. Through a reconstruction of his history, the book highlights the oft-forgotten role of media in the making of the idea of India. It shows how early twentieth-century colonial India was a curious melee of ideas and people - a time of rising nationalism, as well as an influx of Western ideas; of unprecedented violence and compelling non-violence; of press censorship and defiant journalism. It shows how Ramananda Chatterjee navigated this world and went beyond the traditional definition of the nation as an entity with fixed boundaries to anticipate Benedict Anderson and Ernest Gellner. The volume also examines the wide reach and scope of his journals in English, Hindi and Bengali, which published the likes of Rabindranath Tagore, Subhash Bose, Abanindranath Tagore, Nandalal Bose, Ananda Coomaraswamy, the scientist J. C. Bose and Zhu Deh, the co-founder of the Chinese Red Army. He also published India in Bondage by the American Unitarian minister J. T. Sunderland, which resulted in his arrest. An intriguing behind-the-scenes look of early twentieth-century colonial India, this book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of history, modern South Asia and media and cultural studies.

The Caravan is India’s most respected and admired magazine on politics, art and culture. With a strong literary flair, the magazine presents the best of reportage and commentary on politics, policy, economy, art and culture from within South Asia. It has become an essential read for anyone interested in understanding the political and social environment of the country.

The primary era of this study - the twentieth century - symbolizes the peak of the colonial rule and its total decline, as well as the rise of the new nation state of India. The processes that have been labeled 'westernization' and 'modernization' radically changed middle-class Indian life during the century. This book describes and explains the various technological, political and social developments that shaped one building type - the bungalow - contemporaneous to the development of modern Indian history during the period of British rule and its subsequent aftermath. Drawing on their own physical and photographic documentation, and building on previous work by Anthony King and the Desais, the authors show the evolution of the bungalow's architecture from a one storey building with a verandah to the assortment of house-forms and their regional variants that are derived from the bungalow. Moreover, the study correlates changes in society with architectural consequences in the plans and aesthetics of the bungalow. It also examines more generally what it meant to be modern in Indian society as the twentieth century evolved.

This monograph breaks new ground by weaving stories of fathers and children into the history of gender, family and nation in colonial India. Focusing on the reformist Bengali Hindu and Brahmo communities, the author contends that fatherhood assumed new meaning and significance in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century India. During this time of social and political change, fathers extended their roles beyond breadwinning to take an active part in rearing their children. Utilizing pedagogic literature, articles in scientific journals, autobiographies, correspondence, and published essays, Fathers in a Motherland documents the different ways the authority and power of the father was invoked and constituted both metaphorically and in everyday experiences. Exploring specific moments when educated men—as biological fathers, literary activists, and educators—assumed guardianship and became crucial agents of change, Banerjee interrogates the connections between fatherhood and masculinity. The last chapter of the book moves beyond Bengal and draws on the lives of Mohandas K. Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru to provide a broader salience to its argument. Reclaiming two missing links in Indian history-fathers and children-the book argues that biological and imaginary "fathers" assumed the moral guardianship of an incipient nation and rested their hopes and dreams on the future generation.

India's State-run Media presents a new perspective on broadcasting by bringing together two neglected areas of research in media studies in India - the intertwined genealogies of sovereignty, public, religion, and nation in radio and television, and the spatiotemporal dynamics of broadcasting into a single analytic inquiry. It argues that the spatiotemporalities of broadcasting and the inter-relationships among the public, religion, and nation can be traced to an organizing concept that shaped India's late colonial and postcolonial histories - sovereignty. The book contends that studies of television have glossed over the meanings, experiences, and practices of the religious in televisual narratives and viewers' interpretations of television programs. Drawing on the philosophical writings of Paul Ricoeur and Michel Foucault, connecting their ideas with media, cultural, and religious studies, it examines cultural discourses, power relations, repertoire of meanings, social events, etc. in broadcasting in late colonial and postcolonial India.