This book is a historical study of the largest pilgrimage festival in the world, the Kumbh Mela. Focusing on the festival in a key northern Indian political town, Allahabad, the book traces the historical changes in the nature of the mela from the 1700s onward, with particular reference to the influence of British colonialism and the growth of Indian nationalism in the region. It charts the early nationalists' active construction of religion as a sphere of sovereignty, and the attendant changes to religious and social practices at the mela. Further, the book traces the links between the religious community that the mela fostered and the spread of nationalism in the early twentieth century. It also follows and analyzes debates about the role of religion – so often described as modernity's other – in the creation of notions of citizenship and civil society in the late colonial and postcolonial Indian nation.
Narratives about the revolutionary movement have largely been the preserve of the popular domain in India, as Christopher Pinney has recently pointed out. India's best-known revolutionary, Bhagat Singh—who was executed by the British in 1931 for his role in the Lahore Conspiracy Case—has been celebrated more in posters, colourful bazaar histories and comic books than in academic tomes. These popular formats have established a hegemonic narrative of his life that has proved to be resistant to subsequent interventions as new materials, such as freshly-declassified intelligence reports and oral history testimonies, come to light. This paper accounts for why Bhagat Singh's life story has predominantly prevailed in the domain of the popular, with special reference to the secrecy of the revolutionary movement and the censure and censorship to which it was subjected in the 1930s.
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