A radical contribution to the understanding of Indian history as a discipline, this book explores the politics of history-writing in modern India. It narrativizes the engagement of a civilization with the historical sensibility and modality. In doing so, it asserts that history, in order to be understood better, has to deploy the language of the layperson in India, and interact with the mythic, the ahistorical, and the folk. The endeavor is not to offer a comprehensive account over the last two centuries, but rather to explore the manner in which historical thinking inserted itself into the public domain.

The History of History: Politics and Scholarship in Modern India

History

Lal, Vinay

Asia

Oxford University Press

A radical contribution to the understanding of Indian history as a discipline, this book explores the politics of history-writing in modern India. It narrativizes the engagement of a civilization with the historical sensibility and modality. In doing so, it asserts that history, in order to be understood better, has to deploy the language of the layperson in India, and interact with the mythic, the ahistorical, and the folk. The endeavor is not to offer a comprehensive account over the last two centuries, but rather to explore the manner in which historical thinking inserted itself into the public domain.

The city has had a long history in India, from the urban civilization of the Indus Valley in 2500 BCE to the megalopolis found in contemporary India. This is the first anthology of the city in India since around 1800, with an accent on the twentieth century. Drawing on fiction, poetry, essays, travel narratives, and scholarly studies in history, anthropology, and cultural studies, this two-volume anthology presents insights into the city with a mix of readings from the most renowned writers, established scholars and authors, and younger voices. Including poems, short stories, essays, and social commentaries by 54 writers, this volume, in particular, looks at the mosaic of the city, the city of imagination, the city in colonial India, the architecture of the city and its streets. With contributions from leading writers and scholars including U.R. Ananthamurthy, Diana L. Eck, Arjun Appadurai, Dilip Chitre, Charles Correa, Rabindranath Tagore, Mark Twain, Salman Rushdie, Herbert Baker, A.K. Ramanujan, Lina M. Fruzzetti, and Majrooh Sultanpuri, this volume comes with a comprehensive Introduction by Vinay Lal which sets the context for the writings and a special 'further reading: a select bibliography' for the interested reader.

The Oxford Anthology of the Modern Indian City: Volume I: The City in its Plenitude

Literature & Fiction

World Literature

The city has had a long history in India, from the urban civilization of the Indus Valley in 2500 BCE to the megalopolis found in contemporary India. This is the first anthology of the city in India since around 1800, with an accent on the twentieth century. Drawing on fiction, poetry, essays, travel narratives, and scholarly studies in history, anthropology, and cultural studies, this two-volume anthology presents insights into the city with a mix of readings from the most renowned writers, established scholars and authors, and younger voices. Including poems, short stories, essays, and social commentaries by 64 writers, this volume, in particular, looks at the politics and violence in the city, the social web of life in the metropolis, the dalits, labourers, slum-dwellers, and outsiders, the many ethnicities, art and culture, and the past and future of the city. With contributions from leading writers and scholars including M.J. Akbar, Thomas Blom Hansen, Amitav Ghosh, Harriet Ronken Lynton, Bhisham Sahni, Shiv Visvanathan, Martha Ann Selby, Abdul Halim Sharar, Mirza Ghalib, Tanya Marie Luhrmann, and James Manor, this volume comes with a comprehensive Introduction by Vinay Lal which sets the context for the writings and a special reader's guide for the interested reader.

The Oxford Anthology of the Modern Indian City: Volume II: Making and Unmaking the City-Politics, Culture, and Life Forms

Empire of Knowledge: Culture and Plurality in the Global Economy

'Vinay Lal is a new and important presence in the world of scholars who question the intellectual and cultural assumptions that accompany the processes of modernisation, development and globalization.' Dipesh Chakrabarty, The University of Chicago During the media frenzy over the Millennium celebrations, there was hardly any mention of the fact that, for the majority of the world, there was no Millennium at all. This linear understanding of time is a specifically Western - and Christian - concept. This is just one of many examples that Vinay Lal uses to demonstrate that nearly every idea which we take for granted in the west is part of a politics of ideas. Oppression is usually associated with class struggle and other forms of economic monopoly. Lal looks beyond this, deconstructing the cultural assumptions that have emerged alongside capitalism to offer a devastating critique of the politics of knowledge at the heart of all powerbroking. Other topics examined are the concept of 'development', which has provided a mandate for surreptitious colonisation; and the idea of the 'nation state', something we have lived with for no more than two centuries, yet is accepted without question. Linking this to the emergence of 'international governance' through the United Nations, the US, and imperial economic bodies (such as the IMF and WTO), Lal explains how such universalisms came to dominate the trajectory of Western thought.

Pluto Press

During the media frenzy over the Millennium celebrations, there was hardly any mention of the fact that, for the majority of the world, there was no Millennium at all. This linear understanding of time is a specifically Western – and Christian – concept. This is just one of many examples that Vinay Lal uses to demonstrate that nearly every idea which we take for granted in the west is part of a politics of ideas. Oppression is usually associated with class struggle and other forms of economic monopoly. Lal looks beyond this, deconstructing the cultural assumptions that have emerged alongside capitalism to offer a devastating critique of the politics of knowledge at the heart of all powerbroking. Other topics examined are the concept of 'development', which has provided a mandate for surreptitious colonisation; and the idea of the 'nation state', something we have lived with for no more than two centuries, yet is accepted without question. Linking this to the emergence of 'international governance' through the United Nations, the US, and imperial economic bodies (such as the IMF and WTO), Lal explains how such universalisms came to dominate the trajectory of Western thought.

"Introducing Hinduism" offers a guide to the key philosophical, literary, mythological and cultural traditions of this extraordinarily diverse faith. It untangles the complexities of Hinduism's gods and goddesses, its caste system and its views on sex, everyday life and asceticism. This work answers questions including: Why do Hindus revere the cow? Must Hindus be vegetarian? And much more...

Introducing Hinduism: A Graphic Guide (Graphic Guides)

Comics & Graphic Novels

Van Loon, Borin

Graphic Novels

Icon Books

The eight essays that comprise this book offer a ‘dissenting, futurist, and hermeneutic’ perspective on Indian civilization and various aspects of the modern cultural history of India. Feminism, subaltern studies, postcolonial theory and cultural studies have helped to pose new and important questions about our knowledge of India, but there has been insufficient engagement with local forms of knowledge, and with the non-modern, ahistoricist, mythic, vernacular and pluralist elements of Indian civilization. Although this scholarship offers rearrangements within the existing frames of knowledge, it seldom dispenses with the frames. This book is an attempt to help in establishing a tradition of modern Indian criticism, of which there are only a handful of practitioners in English in India today. 
The essays, all in an easily readable style, cover a wide range of cultural phenomena and offer a sweeping perspective on contemporary Indian society. They explore the national obsession with the Guinness Book of Records and the paranoia over VIP security, the politics of sexuality as embodied in the lifestyles of hijras and the nationalist fervour over nuclear tests. There are essays on the impossibility of the Other in the Hindi film, on the World Cup of Cricket, on Gandhi’s life as an ecological treatise, and on Gandhi’s experiments with celibate sexuality. The idea of India as a nations-state is, as the essays suggest, slowly encroaching upon the idea of India as a civilization, and the essays explore how our finite games can be transformed into infinite games.

Of Cricket, Guinness and Gandhi: Essays of Indian History and Culture

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

Seagull Books

• Beautifully presented with a reversible cover jacket with poster\nInsurgency and the Artist explores not merely how Indian printmakers and artists responded to the freedom struggle but also how the art they fashioned invoked their own conception of the nation, their sense of the past, and the contors of the movement for India’s emancipation from the yoke of colonial oppression. Recent scholarly work has been almost entirely riveted on nationalist prints, and much of it has focused on the idea of Bharat Mata, but this book seeks to furnish a more rounded account of the artwork — including etchings, paintings, woodblocks prints, and cartoons — contemporary to the freedom struggle and also highlights the work of neglected artists such as Babuji Shilpi, S.L. Parasher, Zainul Abedin, and M.V. Dhurandhar, among others. The author considers how the Indian past was rendered as one of martial resistance to ‘foreign’ rule, the manner in which artists worked with mythic material, and, of course, the treatment of the larger-than-life figures of Gandhi, Bhagat Singh, Subhas Bose, and other patriots in nationalist art. This gloriously illustrated work simultaneously offers a narrative history of the freedom struggle and the rich interplay of text and images is designed to offer insights that neither conventional histories nor images can offer in isolation. Insurgency and the Artist is also an inquiry into how ideas travel across borders, the porousness of culture, and the relationship of art to politics.

Insurgency and The Artist: The Art of The Freedom Struggle in India

Arts & Photography

History & Criticism

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

Books by Lal, Vinay

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

The History of History: Politics and Scholarship in Modern India

The History of History: Politics and Scholarship in Modern India

The Oxford Anthology of the Modern Indian City: Volume I: The City in its Plenitude

The Oxford Anthology of the Modern Indian City: Volume II: Making and Unmaking the City-Politics, Culture, and Life Forms

Empire of Knowledge: Culture and Plurality in the Global Economy

Empire of Knowledge: Culture and Plurality in the Global Economy

Introducing Hinduism: A Graphic Guide (Graphic Guides)

Of Cricket, Guinness and Gandhi: Essays of Indian History and Culture

Insurgency and The Artist: The Art of The Freedom Struggle in India