‘A new type of revolution’: socialist thought in India, 1940s–1960s

Abstract

Although it is often said that early postcolonial India was socialist, scholars have tended to take this term for granted. This article investigates how Indians defined socialism in the two decades after independence. It finds that there were six areas of agreement among Indian socialists: the centrality of the individual, the indispensability of work, the continued importance of private property, that the final goal was a more equal -but not flat -society, that this change had to be brought about without violence, and that the final goal of Indian socialism ought to be spiritual fulfilment. Understanding how Indians defined their version of socialism, it is argued, will help scholars re-evaluate the role of the first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, in defining the goals India pursued after independence. It will also re-orient our understanding of the expectations and limitations of the Indian state in this crucial period in Indian history.

The resurrection of earlier imprints post mortem: Explaining the Turkish agricultural cooperative movement with an imprinting theory lens, 1888–1937

“…Scholarly work on the lifecycle of cooperatives has substantially improved our understanding of the regeneration mechanisms of previously eroded cooperative values, especially for several cooperative forms founded in the Western contexts Storey et al, 2014). However, closer scrutiny of these studies immediately informs us that the articulated regeneration mechanisms have not been replicated for other contexts, where cooperatives' foundational configurations and imbued logics substantially differ (Ji, 2018;Ngo, 2009;Sherman, 2018;Wanyama et al, 2009). The linear and consecutive mechanisms offered by the lifecycle approach fail to account for the peculiar evolutionary pattern of Turkish agricultural cooperatives, which perpetuated their state-dependence, non-unionized structure, limited liability principle, broad geographical scope, imece practice, short-term credit lending, single-tasked cooperative goal, and capital accumulation methods even in the face of significant socio-economic transformations and constant interventions in their configurations.…”

India's democracy before the democratic discontent, 1940s–1970s

“…31 31 See, for example, Taylor C. Sherman, “‘A New Type of Revolution’: Socialist Thought in India, 1940s–1960s,” Postcolonial Studies 21.4 (2018b), 485–504; Balasubramanian, “Contesting ‘Permit‐And‐Licence Raj’, 2021, 251, 189–227; Pradeep K. Chhibber and Rahul Verma, Ideology and Identity: The Changing Party Systems of India (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), chapters 1 and 3. …”

Developing histories of Indian development

“…6 6 Taylor C. Sherman, “‘A new type of revolution’: socialist thought in India, 1940s–1960s,” Postcolonial Studies, 2018, 21:4, 485‐504; Daniel Kent‐Carrasco, “A battle over meanings: Jayaprakash Narayan, Rammanohar Lohia and the trajectories of socialism in early independent India,” Global Intellectual History, 2017, Vol. 2, No.…”