Cultural History of Modern India

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India s recent history has been narrated largely in terms of the nationalist movement, personalities, and what has been seen as the high politics of the state. Recent shifts in historical writing try to bring a wider understanding of politics, history and the ordinary people who make history. These six essays push the emerging paradigm further by moving away from conventional notions of the history of the nation and the political to present original and pioneering forays in the study of cricket, oral history, gender studies, film, popular culture and Indian classical music. These essays show how ideas of self, community and art are formed within a larger politic and how culture, far from being a refuge from the political, is also the space within which politics is formulated. The history of modern India has been narrated largely in terms of the nationalist movement, Personalities and what has been seen as the 'high' politics of the state. Recent shifts in history writing have tried to bring in subordinated histories of regions and of groups. We are moving towards a wider understanding of politics, history and of the ordinary people who make history. This collection tries to push the emerging paradigm further by moving away from conventional notions of the history of the nation and indeed of the political. Six essays present original and pioneering forays in the study of cricket, oral history, gender studies, film, popular culture and Indian classical music. Content: Preface and Acknowledgements Introduction Cricket and Caste: The Heroic Struggles of the Palwankar Brothers A Book of Her Own, A Life of Her Own: The Autobiography of a Nineteenth-Century Woman The Past in the Present National Identity and the Realist Aesthetic Unity in Diversity? Dilemmas of Nationhood in Indian Calendar Art Guru and Gramophone: Fantasies of Fidelity and Modern Technologies of the Real

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Dilip M. Menon is Reader in Modern Indian History at the Univesity of Delhi, and is author of Caste, Nationalism and Communism in South India: Malabar 1900-48, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1994, and The Blindness of Insight: Essays on Caste inModern India, Navayana, Pondicherry.