History, Culture and the Indian City

A substantial collection of unpublished articles, lectures and papers from one of the finest Indian historians of the twentieth century.

Rajnayaran Chandavarkar (Author)

9780521768719, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 3 September 2009

282 pages
23.5 x 16 x 1.8 cm, 0.6 kg

'All the essays in the volume are alive with Chandavarkar's voice; his gentle intellectual power and soft revolutionary influence. They issue a timely challenge to South-Asianists of all stripes as well as a new generation of scholars to think across ossifying disciplinary boundaries and thought-clogging accepted intellectual discourses to reanimate the study of South Asian society.' The Journal of Asian Studies

Raj Chandavarkar was one of the finest Indian historians of the twentieth century. He died sadly young in 2006, leaving behind a very substantial collection of unpublished lectures, papers and articles. These have now been assembled and edited by Jennifer Davis, Gordon Johnson and David Washbrook, and their appearance will be widely welcomed by large numbers of scholars of Indian history, politics and society. The essays centre around three major themes: the city of Bombay, Indian politics and society, and Indian historiography. Each manifests Dr Chandavarkar's hallmark historical powers of imaginative empirical richness, analytic acuity and expository elegance, and the collection as a whole will make both a major contribution to the historiography of modern India, and a worthy memorial to a major scholar.

1. Introduction
2. Bombay's perennial modernities
3. Sewers
4. Peasants and proletarians in Bombay City in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century
5. State and society in colonial India
6. Religion and nationalism in India
7. From neighbourhood to nation: the rise and fall of the left in Bombay's Girangaon in the twentieth century
8. Historians and the nation
9. Urban history and urban anthropology in South Asia
10. Aspects of the historiography of labour in India
11. Post-script
12. Bibliography.

Subject Areas: 20th century history: c 1900 to c 2000 [HBLW], Asian history [HBJF]