Abstract
This chapter discusses the construction of diverse selves in India. It asserts that plurality is the necessary condition for conceptualizing India. Nineteenth-century India was a period during which developed the varied identities that were to shape Indian politics in the future. The chapter presents a scrutiny of construction of plural selves from the perspective of caste, gender, nationality, religion and class.
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Notes
- 1.
See Biswas Bidisha (2010) “Negotiating the nation: Diaspora contestations in the USA about hindu nationalism in India”, Nations and Nationalism 16 (4), 2010, 696–714. Globalization and the Challenges of a New Century, ed. Patrick O’Meara, Howard D. Mehlinger, and Matthew Krain (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000); Simon Ravinovitch (2012) Jews and Diaspora Nationalism: Writings on Jewish Peoplehood in Europe and United States, Brandeis University Press, New England, USA; Adogame, Afe (ed.) (2014) The Public face of African New Religious Movements in Diaspora: Imaging the religious ‘Other’, Ashgate Publishing, England; Catarina Kinnvall and Ted Svensson (2010) “Hindu nationalism, diaspora politics and nation-building in India”, Australian Journal of International Affairs, Volume 64, No. 3: 274–292; Michael Vicente Perez (2014) “Between religion and nationalism in Palestinian diaspora”, Nations and Nationalism, Volume 20(4): 801–820.
- 2.
See Jaffrelot, Christopher (1996) The Hindu Nationalist Movement and Indian Politics: 1925 to the 1990s: Strategies of identity building, implantation and mobilization, Penguin Books, Delhi.
- 3.
For a detailed account of the Moplah Rebellion, Robert Hardgrave (1977) “The Mappilla Rebellion, 1921: Peasant Revolt in Malabar”, Modern Asian Studies, Volume 11(1): 57–99.
- 4.
On Puroshottam Das Tandon, see William Gould (2002) “Congress Radicals and Hindu Militancy: Sampurnanand and Purushottam Das Tandon in the Politics of the United Provinces, 1930–47”, Modern Asian Studies, 36 (3):619–655. For K.M. Munshi, see Manu Bhagavan (2008) “The Hindutva Underground: Hindu Nationalism and the Indian National Congress in late colonial and early post-colonial India”, Economic and Political Weekly, Volume 43(37) 39–48.
- 5.
Swadeshi means “produced in one’s own country.” The movement generated the nationalist feeling of buying only goods and clothes made in India and boycott was a corollary to this; that is all British-made goods were boycotted.
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Sengupta, P. (2018). Construction of Plural Selves in India. In: Language as Identity in Colonial India. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-6844-7_5
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