A Revolutionary History of Interwar India

Maclean, Kama

doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190217150.001.0001

Cited by 42 publications

(17 citation statements)

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“…Thus, between 1928 and 1931 in the Punjab, Bhagat Singh and his acolytes rooted their agitations and aspirations, in Maclean's felicitous phrase, in 'a politics of impatience.' 13 From 1919 to 1947 in Bengal, maintains Ghosh, bhadralok dacoits similarly pursued terror with imminent objectives in mind, 'most importantly, new futures.' 14 I wish to keep vivid the tensions the authors so astutely probe between past and postcolonial present, a temporal span ultimately bridged by the 'former futures' of revolutionary thought in British India.…”

Section: The Futures Past Of Anticolonial Archivesmentioning

confidence: 99%

New histories of political violence and revolutionary terrorism in modern South Asia

Amstutz

Elam²,

Choudhury³

et al. 2019

South Asian History and Culture

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This book round table discusses two recent monographs on political violence and revolutionary terrorism in late colonial India, Kama Maclean's A Revolutionary History of Interwar India: Violence, Image, Voice and Text (2015) and Durba Ghosh's Gentlemanly Terrorists: Political Violence and the Colonial State in India, 1919India, -1947India, (2017. Maclean's A Revolutionary History of Interwar India uncovers how revolutionaries in Punjab and northern India reshaped the goals and tactics of the Indian independence movement, especially the policy of nonviolence. Ghosh's Gentlemanly Terrorists explores the relationship of political violence in Bengal to the development of the modern nation-state in India. Both Ghosh and Maclean rethink the conventional narrative of the Indian freedom struggle and connect local developments in South Asia to global trends in anticolonial resistance and to larger conversations about the relationship between democracy and surveillance. In the five review essays, Daniel Elam, Rishad Choudhury, Mou Banerjee, Rohit De, and Michael Silvestri assess the impact of these two monographs on South Asian history, legal studies, histories of religion, studies of anticolonial movements, and British imperial historiography. In their responses, Maclean and Ghosh assess the challenges of writing histories of revolutionaries in the present in relation to the anticipated futures of the revolutionaries themselves.

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Section: The Futures Past Of Anticolonial Archivesmentioning

confidence: 99%

New histories of political violence and revolutionary terrorism in modern South Asia

Amstutz

Elam²,

Choudhury³

et al. 2019

South Asian History and Culture

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…The questions I grapple with can be traced back to scholarship on 'history and memory', as well as 'public history', and certainly both are pertinent when considering films as forms of popular history, particularly since in India there is a complex borrowing and conflict between scholarly and popular forms of history. 13 Second, the relationship between professional and popular history is hierarchical and often fraught with tensions. Narratives about the militant movement find more space in vernacular histories, 'bazaar histories', posters and films rather than English language academic volumes.…”

Section: Towards a Popular Memory?mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…12 The reasons for this are varied, ranging from state homage paid to Gandhi and the INC by preserving writings and other party records, to the delayed declassification of records of Indian revolutionaries, and clandestine nature of militancy itself. 13 Second, the relationship between professional and popular history is hierarchical and often fraught with tensions. Professional or academic history lays claim to a certain objective truth, rationalism and positivistic neutrality, while popular history is castigated as emanating from and perpetuating myths, beliefs and sentiments.…”

Section: Towards a Popular Memory?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Recovering History: Gender, Anti‐colonial Militancy and Indian Popular Cinema

Kachwala¹

2018

Gender & History

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“…What does survive of Wildcat of Bombay is a collection of telling images for reconstructing Bhagat Singh’s anticolonial imaginary. 18 Kama Maclean has written extensively about the production and circulation of Bhagat Singh’s famous and attractive studio portrait, made in early 1929 at Ramnath Photographers in Delhi (Maclean, 2015). Similarly, Chris Pinney has argued that Bhagat Singh’s visual appeal is in his cosmopolitan mimicry of the White sahib, made even more compelling by the story of his escape from Lahore in 1929 (Pinney, 2006).…”

Section: Aestheticsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…19.Kama Maclean notes that “Bhagat Singh delighted in the cinema hall … [and] reveled in the pleasurable escapism of comedy and gangster films. Perhaps it is there than he honed his sense of thriller nationalism” (Maclean, 2015, p. 222).…”

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confidence: 99%

The Martyr, the Moviegoer: Bhagat Singh at the Cinema

Elam¹

2017

BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies

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This article attempts to rethink Indian anticolonial agitator Bhagat Singh within four alternative lineages, rooted in his often undiscussed love of early Hindi and American cinema. To date, Bhagat Singh has often been confined within the rubrics of a properly political form of revolution, whereby revolution is recognizable to the colonial state. To rethink revolution requires scholars to question the repetition of these colonial logics by moving away from the “recognizably political” to other forms of anti-authorial, anticolonial practices. This article focuses on Bhagat Singh’s viewing and response to the 1927 American iteration of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the 1927 Hindi film Wildcat of Bombay. The article considers the ways in which Bhagat Singh moved beyond “properly political” forms of agitation in favor of affective, aesthetic, and experiential models of movie-going in the early twentieth century. By doing so, it reorganizes the categories of “world literature” away from the nation-state in favor of worldwide circulation, distribution, and interpretation.

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A Revolutionary History of Interwar India

Cited by 42 publications

References 0 publications

New histories of political violence and revolutionary terrorism in modern South Asia

New histories of political violence and revolutionary terrorism in modern South Asia

Recovering History: Gender, Anti‐colonial Militancy and Indian Popular Cinema

The Martyr, the Moviegoer: Bhagat Singh at the Cinema

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