The destruction of the Babri Masjid at Ayodhya in December 1992 was a watershed in the politics of independent India. It was also an apocalyptic turning-point for community life at Ayodhya, and for the highly interdependent cultural lives of Hindus and Muslims living there. This book narrates how Ayodhya's inhabitants experienced the events that led up to and followed the destruction of the mosque.

Creating a Nationality: The Ramjanmabhumi Movement and Fear of the Self

History

Mayaram, Shail

Nandy, Ashis

Trivedy, Shikha

Yagnik, Achyut

Asia

Oxford University Press

The destruction of the Babri Masjid at Ayodhya in December 1992 was a watershed in the politics of independent India. It was also an apocalyptic turning-point for community life at Ayodhya, and for the highly interdependent cultural lives of Hindus and Muslims living there. This book narrates how Ayodhya's inhabitants experienced the events that led up to and followed the destruction of the mosque.

Creating a Nationality: The Ramjanmabhumi Movement and Fear of the Self (Oxford India Collection (Paperback))

Against History, Against State

Reassessing conventional South Asian historiography from a subaltern perspective, Against History, Against State examines how conceptions of history and memory clash. For nearly a millennium, the Meos of northwest India―one of the largest Muslim populations in South Asia―endured a succession of brutally oppressive regimes, from the Arab conquest in the eighth century through the establishment of the Turkish Sultanate, the Mughal Empire, the regional Rajput kingdoms, and the era of British imperialism. Unwilling to abandon their ethnic and religious identity, the Meos developed an independent oral tradition that enabled them to challenge state formation for centuries. By creating an alternate record of their past through songs and stories, the Meos were able to successfully retain a degree of cultural sovereignty. But their quest for autonomy was stigmatized, even criminalized, while histories―written by the literate, ruling elite―transformed ethnic prejudice into historical fact. This pioneering study, based on a decade of intensive research, explores the Meo community through their oral tradition, revealing sophisticated modes of collective memory and self-governance. Against History, Against State reveals the remarkable complexity and resilience of a transgressive culture that has survived on the margins of Hinduism and Islam.

Columbia University Press

Nationalism is among the most influential ideas that has shaped the 'Metamorphoses of the Political' in the long twentieth century. This book focuses on exclusivist Indian nationalism and identifies its distinction from inclusivist nationalism. It highlights shifts in 'another Indian nationalism' over the last two centuries as the geopolitical context has transitioned from the Pax Britannica to the Pax Americana and its war on terror. The books braids the following three strands together: first, a majoritarian nationalist ideology called Hindutva; second, the making of popular history as a precolonial epic is highlighted, depicting the defeat of the last Hindu Emperor by a conquering Muslim Sultan purportedly leading to eight centuries of Hindu enslavement and third, the 'reconversion' of a community by the Visva Hindu Parishad with consequences for Lived Hinduism and Indic civilisation with its complex identities.

The Secret Life of Another Indian Nationalism: Transitions from the Pax Britannica to the Pax Americana (Metamorphoses of the Political: Multidisciplinary Approaches)

Politics & Social Sciences

Anthropology

Cambridge University Press

Using historical and ethnographic methods, this book explores transitions in popular Indian nationalism. It highlights the shifts and transitions from the Pax Britannica to the Pax Americana over the last two centuries, and examines new sources of the self as the local intersects, collides and interpenetrates with the global and national, suggesting new nationalist imperatives in the age of imperial terror.  The book engages with several significant debates such as whether colonialism constituted a violent rupture, and it suggests ways in which the pre-colonial was appropriated by colonial projects, and how colonial texts were transmuted into nationalist projects. The book goes on to review orientalism from discourse analysis of languages other than Sanskrit or English, and uses the figure of James Tod to explore vernacular orientalism and the interface between the literary, the historical and the political.   Bringing together the understanding of an ideology with that of a community, and linking the local and the global, this book will be of interest to those studying Indian Politics, Nationalism and South Asian History.

Transitions in Indian Nationalism (Intersections: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories)

Reference

Routledge

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Mayaram, Shail. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Mayaram, Shail