On the Form, Politics and Effects of Writing Revolution

Elam, J. Daniel; Moffat, Chris

doi:10.1080/00856401.2016.1199293

Cited by 7 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 2 publications

(2 reference statements)

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“…It is an identification with French, Russian, and Irish histories, but its proud recuperation was made possible by the illicit circulation of Political Trouble in India and the Rowlatt Report. 4 As Ghosh shows, the British (and then postcolonial Indian) category of 'terrorism' was a justification, in advance, of state-sanctioned violence. Moreover, 'terrorism' names a prediction of future action which only creates and enforces its own corroboration.…”

Section: 'To Recognize "How It Really Was"'mentioning

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: 'To Recognize "How It Really Was"'mentioning

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

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A second objective is to contribute to modern South Asian intellectual history exploring what Shruti Kapila characterizes as the “Indian political” (Kapila 2014; see also Baxter 2016; Bayly 2011; Bose and Manjapra 2010; Elam and Moffat 2016; Goswami 2004; Kapila, 2007; 2010; Maclean and Elam 2013; Parasher 2022; Sartori 2008). By exhuming the underappreciated Darwinism in Ghose’s political philosophy, I hope to complement “new histories of political thought in India” centering anticolonial thinkers, agitators, and revolutionaries (Elam and Moffat 2016, 514). Drawing on essays penned in the radical broadsheets that Ghose published in the 1910s and just prior ( Bande Mataram , Karmayogin , and Arya ), I show that evolutionary theory formed a conceptual ecosystem framing his understanding of progress—national, spiritual, and civilizational—and reformulating the temporal coordinates of the liberal empire he sought to resist.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The View from the Future: Aurobindo Ghose’s Anticolonial Darwinism

Marwah

2023

Am Polit Sci Rev

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Darwinism and evolutionary theory have a bad track record in political theory, given their entanglements with fin-de-siècle militarist imperialisms, racialized hierarchies, and eugenic reformism. In colonial contexts, however, Darwinism had an entirely different afterlife as anticolonialists marshaled evolutionist frameworks to contest the parameters of colonial rule. This article exhumes just such an evolutionary anticolonialism in the political thought of Aurobindo Ghose, radical firebrand of the early Indian independence movement. I argue that Ghose drew on a nuanced reform Darwinism to criticize British imperialism and advance an alternative grounded in the Indian polity’s mutualism. Evolutionism formed a conceptual ecosystem framing his understanding of progress—national, civilizational, and spiritual—and reformulating the temporal and conceptual coordinates of the liberal empire he resisted. The article thus exposes the constructiveness of anticolonial politics, the hybridity of South Asian intellectual history, and the surprising critical potential of Darwinism in colonial settings.

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South India and Anticolonialism

2019

Geographies of Anticolonialism

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On the Form, Politics and Effects of Writing Revolution

Cited by 7 publications

References 2 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

The View from the Future: Aurobindo Ghose’s Anticolonial Darwinism

South India and Anticolonialism

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