This comprehensive volume examines the relationship between revolutionary politics and the act of writing in modern South Asia. Its pages feature a diverse cast of characters: rebel poets and anxious legislators, party theoreticians and industrious archivists, nostalgic novelists, enterprising journalists and more. The authors interrogate the multiple forms and effects of revolutionary storytelling in politics and public life, questioning the easy distinction between ‘words’ and ‘deeds’ and considering the distinct consequences of writing itself. While acknowledging that the promise, fervour or threat of revolution is never reducible to the written word, this collection explores how manifestos, lyrics, legal documents, hagiographies and other constellations of words and sentences articulate, contest and enact revolutionary political practice in both colonial and post-colonial South Asia. Emphasising the potential of writing to incite, contain or reorient the present, this volume promises to provoke new conversations at the intersection of historiography, politics and literature in South Asia, urging scholars and activists to interrogate their own storytelling practices and the relationship of the contemporary moment to violent and contested pasts. This book was originally published as a special issue of South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies.

In a world of rapid technological advancements, it can be easy to forget that writing is the original Information Technology, created to transcend the limitations of human memory and to defy time and space. The Writing Revolution picks apart the development of this communication tool to show how it has conquered the world. Explores how writing has liberated the world, making possible everything from complex bureaucracy, literature, and science, to instruction manuals and love letters Draws on an engaging range of examples, from the first cuneiform clay tablet, Egyptian hieroglyphs, and Japanese syllabaries, to the printing press and the text messaging Weaves together ideas from a number of fields, including history, cultural studies and archaeology, as well as linguistics and literature, to create an interdisciplinary volume Traces the origins of each of the world’s major written traditions, along with their applications, adaptations, and cultural influences

This is a story of tides and coastlines, winds and waves, islands and beaches. It is also a retelling of indigenous creativity, agency, and resistance in the face of unprecedented globalization and violence. Waves Across the South shifts the narrative of the Age of Revolutions and the origins of the British Empire; it foregrounds a vast southern zone that ranges from the Arabian Sea and southwest Indian Ocean across to the Bay of Bengal, and onward to the South Pacific and the Tasman Sea. As the empires of the Dutch, French, and especially the British reached across these regions, they faced a surge of revolutionary sentiment. Long-standing venerable Eurasian empires, established patterns of trade and commerce, and indigenous practice also served as a context for this transformative era. In addition to bringing long-ignored people and events to the fore, Sujit Sivasundaram opens the door to new and necessary conversations about environmental history, the consequences of historical violence, the legacies of empire, the extraction of resources, and the indigenous futures that Western imperialism cut short. The result is nothing less than a bold new way of understanding our global past, one that also helps us think afresh about our shared future.

In this far-ranging and erudite exploration of the South Asian past, Sumit Guha discusses the shaping of social and historical memory in world-historical context. He presents memory as the result of both remembering and forgetting and of the preservation, recovery, and decay of records. By describing how these processes work through sociopolitical organizations, Guha delineates the historiographic legacy acquired by the British in colonial India; the creation of the centralized educational system and mass production of textbooks that led to unification of historical discourses under colonial auspices; and the divergence of these discourses in the twentieth century under the impact of nationalism and decolonization. Guha brings together sources from a range of languages and regions to provide the first intellectual history of the ways in which socially recognized historical memory has been made across the subcontinent. This thoughtful study contributes to debates beyond the field of history that complicate the understanding of objectivity and documentation in a seemingly post-truth world.

Whether spurred by religious images or academic history books, hardly a day goes by in South Asia without an incident or court case occurring as a result of hurt religious feelings. The sharp rise in blasphemy accusations over the past few decades calls for an investigation into why offence politics has become so pronounced, and why it is observable across religious and political differences. Outrage offers an interdisciplinary study of this growing trend. Bringing together researchers in Anthropology, Religious Studies, Languages, South Asia Studies and History, all with rich experience in the variegated ways in which religion and politics intersect in this region, the volume presents a fine-grained analysis that navigates and unpacks the religious sensitivities and political concerns under discussion. Each chapter focuses on a recent case or context of alleged blasphemy or desecration in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Myanmar, collectively exploring common denominators across national and religious differences. Among the common features are the rapid introduction of social media and smartphones, the possible political gains of initiating blasphemy accusations, and the growing self-assertion of marginal communities. These features are turning South Asia into a veritable flash point for offence controversies in the world today, and will be of interest to researchers exploring the intersection of religion and politics in South Asia and beyond.

From a MacArthur "Genius," a bold new perspective on the history of Asia, highlighting the long quest to tame its waters Asia's history has been shaped by her waters. In Unruly Waters, historian Sunil Amrith reimagines Asia's history through the stories of its rains, rivers, coasts, and seas -- and of the weather-watchers and engineers, mapmakers and farmers who have sought to control them. Looking out from India, he shows how dreams and fears of water shaped visions of political independence and economic development, provoked efforts to reshape nature through dams and pumps, and unleashed powerful tensions within and between nations. Today, Asian nations are racing to construct hundreds of dams in the Himalayas, with dire environmental impacts; hundreds of millions crowd into coastal cities threatened by cyclones and storm surges. In an age of climate change, Unruly Waters is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand Asia's past and its future.

The history of the modern riot parallels the development of the modern novel and the modern lyric. Yet there has been no sustained attempt to trace or theorize the various ways writers over time and in different contexts have shaped cultural perceptions of the riot as a distinctive form of political and social expression. Through a focus on questions of voice, massing, and mediation, this collection is the first cross-cultural study of the interrelatedness of a prevalent mode of political and economic protest and the variable styles of writing that riots inspired. This volume will provide historical depth and cultural nuance, as well as examine more recent theoretical attempts to understand the resurgence of rioting in a time of unprecedented global uncertainty. One of the key contentions of this collection is that literature has done more than merely record riotous practices. Rather literature has, in variable ways, used them as raw material to stimulate and accelerate its own formal development and critical responsiveness. For some writers this has manifested in a move away from classical norms of propriety and accord, and toward a more openly contingent, chaotic, and unpredictable scenography and cast of dramatis personae, while others have moved towards narrative realism or, more recently, digital media platforms to manifest the crises that riots unleash. Keenly attuned to these formal variations, the essays in this collection analyse literature's fraught dialogue with the histories of violence that are bound up in the riot as an inherently volatile form of collective action.

Focusing on the Hindustan Socialist Republican Army (HSRA), A Revolutionary History . . . delivers a fresh perspective on the ambitions, ideologies and practices of this influential organization formed by Chandrashekhar Azad and Bhagat Singh, and inspired by transnational anti-imperial dissent. It is a new interpretation of the activities and political impact of the north Indian revolutionaries who advocated the use of political violence against the British. Kama Maclean contends that the actions of these revolutionaries had a direct impact on Congress politics and tested its policy of non-violence. In doing so she draws on visual culture studies, demonstrating the efficacy of imagery in constructing—as opposed to merely illustrating—historical narratives. Maclean analyses visual evidence alongside recently declassified government files, memoirs and interviews to elaborate on the complex relationships between the Congress and the HSRA, which were far less antagonistic than is frequently imagined.

The essential resource on military and political strategy and the making of the modern world The New Makers of Modern Strategy is the next generation of the definitive work on strategy and the key figures who have shaped the theory and practice of war and statecraft throughout the centuries. Featuring entirely new entries by a who’s who of world-class scholars, this new edition provides global, comparative perspectives on strategic thought from antiquity to today, surveying both classical and current themes of strategy while devoting greater attention to the Cold War and post-9/11 eras. The contributors evaluate the timeless requirements of effective strategy while tracing the revolutionary changes that challenge the makers of strategy in the contemporary world. Amid intensifying global disorder, the study of strategy and its history has never been more relevant. The New Makers of Modern Strategy draws vital lessons from history’s most influential strategists, from Thucydides and Sun Zi to Clausewitz, Napoleon, Churchill, Mao, Ben-Gurion, Andrew Marshall, Xi Jinping, and Qassem Soleimani. With contributions by Dmitry Adamsky, John Bew, Tami Davis Biddle, Hal Brands, Antulio J. Echevarria II, Elizabeth Economy, Charles Edel, Eric S. Edelman, Andrew Ehrhardt, Lawrence Freedman, John Lewis Gaddis, Francis J. Gavin, Christopher J. Griffin, Ahmed S. Hashim, Eric Helleiner, Wayne Wei-siang Hsieh, Seth G. Jones, Robert Kagan, Jonathan Kirshner, Matthew Kroenig, James Lacey, Guy Laron, Michael V. Leggiere, Margaret MacMillan, Tanvi Madan, Thomas G. Mahnken, Carter Malkasian, Daniel Marston, John H. Maurer, Walter Russell Mead, Michael Cotey Morgan, Mark Moyar, Williamson Murray, S.C.M. Paine, Sergey Radchenko, Iskander Rehman, Thomas Rid, Joshua Rovner, Priya Satia, Kori Schake, Matt J. Schumann, Brendan Simms, Jason K. Stearns, Hew Strachan, Sue Mi Terry, and Toshi Yoshihara.

Raza traces the anti-colonial struggles of Indian revolutionaries in the context of Communist Internationalism during the last decades of the British Raj.