Violent Fraternity: Indian Political Thought in the Global Age

Shruti Kapila

Published by Princeton University Press 2021

Violent Fraternity

Indian Political Thought in the Global Age

Shruti Kapila

https://doi.org/10.1515/9780691215754

Overview
Contents

About this book

A groundbreaking history of the political ideas that made modern India

Violent Fraternity in the Indian Age is a major history of the political thought that laid the foundations of modern India. Taking readers from the dawn of the twentieth century to the independence of India and formation of Pakistan in 1947, the book is a testament to the power of ideas to drive historical transformation.

Shruti Kapila sheds new light on leading figures such as M. K. Gandhi, Muhammad Iqbal, B. R. Ambedkar, and Vinayak Savarkar, the founder of Hindutva, showing how they were innovative political thinkers as well as influential political actors. She also examines lesser-known figures who contributed to the making of a new canon of political thought, such as B. G. Tilak, considered by Lenin to be the "fountainhead of revolution in Asia," and Sardar Patel, India's first deputy prime minister. Kapila argues that it was in India that modern political languages were remade through a revolution that defied fidelity to any exclusive ideology. The book shows how the foundational questions of politics were addressed in the shadow of imperialism to create both a sovereign India and the world's first avowedly Muslim nation, Pakistan. Fraternity was lost only to be found again in violence as the Indian age signaled the emergence of intimate enmity.

A compelling work of scholarship, Violent Fraternity in the Indian Age demonstrates why India, with its breathtaking scale and diversity, redefined the nature of political violence for the modern global era.

Author / Editor information

Shruti Kapila is University Lecturer in History at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Corpus Christi College. She is the editor of An Intellectual History for India and the coeditor of Political Thought in Action: The Bhagavad Gita and Modern India. Her writing has appeared in leading academic journals such as Past and Present and Modern Intellectual History and in international publications such as the Financial Times, India Today, and Prospect. Twitter @shrutikapila

Reviews

“This truly original book puts Indian nationalist thought in a wider global context without seeing it as derivative or narrowly oppositional to Western liberal traditions, but rather as a powerful, generative, and unique repositioning of the key questions of self, sovereignty, and violence.”—Arjun Appadurai, author of Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger

"A real achievement. Violent Fraternity in the Indian Age is a startlingly original contribution to the scholarship on India and modern political thought more broadly. This book transforms our understanding of India's nationalist past and is likely to globalize the field of political thought in a way no other book has done."—Faisal Devji, author of The Impossible Indian: Gandhi and the Temptation of Violence

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Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Introduction Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
1 Political Theology of Sedition Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	14
2 Ghadar! violence and the political potential of the planet Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	53
3 Hindutva’s War and the Battlefield of India Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	89
4 Gandhi and the Truth of Violence Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	130
5 The Triumph of Fraternity: Sovereign Violence and Pakistan as Peace Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	163
6 The Philosophical Discovery of Muslim Sovereignty Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	194
7 A People’s War: 1947, Civil War and the Rise of Republican Sovereignty Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	229
Epilogue Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	272
Acknowledgements Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	283
Bibliography Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	287
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	305