Sugata Bose Livres

This biography of Subhas Chandra Bose explores the life of the influential Indian nationalist who fought for India's independence from British rule during World War II. It delves into both his public persona and private struggles, offering a comprehensive look at his passionate quest for liberation.

On December 26, 2004, giant tsunami waves destroyed communities around the Indian Ocean, from Indonesia to Kenya. This work offers a reinterpretation of how culture developed and history was made at the height of the British raj.

"'History matters in contemporary debates on nationalism,' Sugata Bose contends in The Nation as Mother. In this interconnected set of deeply researched and powerfully argued essays and speeches Bose explores the relationship between nation, reason and religion in Indian political thought and practice. Offering a subtle interpretation of the ways of imagining the nation as mother, the book illuminates different visions of India as a free and flexible federal union that have acquired renewed salience today. Breaking out of the false dichotomy between secular nationalism and religious communalism, the author provides incisive analyses of the political legacies of Tagore and Gandhi, Nehru and Bose, Aurobindo and Jinnah, and a range of other thinkers and leaders of the anti-colonial movement. The essays question assumptions about any necessary contradiction between cosmopolitanism and patriotism and the tendency among religious majoritarians and secularists alike to confuse uniformity with unity. The speeches in Parliament draw on a rich historical repertoire to offer valuable lessons in political ethics. In arguing against the dangers of an intolerant religious majoritarianism, this book makes a case for concepts of layered and shared sovereignty that might enable an overarching sense of Indian nationhood to coexist with multiple identities of the country's diverse populace. The Nation as Mother delves into history on the occasion of the seventieth anniversary of freedom to evoke an alternative future of a new India based on cultural intimacy among its different communities."--Publisher description

Jointly written by two leading Indian and Pakistani historians, Modern South Asia offers a rare depth of historical understanding of the politics, cultures and economies that shape the lives of more than a fifth of humanity. After sketching the pre-modern history of the sub-continent, the book concentrates on the last three centuries.This new second edition has been updated throughout to take account of recent historical research. It includes an expanded section on post-independence with a completely new chapter on the period from 1991 to the present and a chapter on the last millennium in subcontinental history. There is a new chronology of key events.

This fifth edition offers a comprehensive analysis of modern South Asian history, incorporating the latest research and scholarship. It explores significant developments across the subcontinent's diverse social, economic, and political landscape, providing critical interpretations and debates that reflect the complexities of the region's past.

Subhas Chandra Bose’s ‘discovery of India’, unlike Jawaharlal Nehru’s, occurred very early in life, when he was barely in his teens. ‘How many selfless sons of the Mother are prepared, in this selfish age,’ the fifteen-year-old Subhas asked his mother in 1912, ‘to completely give up their personal interests and take the plunge for the Mother? Mother, is this son of yours yet ready?’ As he stood on the verge of taking the plunge by resigning from the Indian Civil Service in 1921, he wrote to his elder brother ‘Only on the soil of sacrifice and suffering can we raise our national edifice.’In December 1937 Bose wrote ten chapters of his autobiography, providing a narrative of his life until 1921 and a reflective chapter entitled ‘My Faith-Philosophical’. The autobiography is complemented with a fascinating collection of seventy letters of Bose’s childhood, adolescence and youth. It is not often that remembrances written later in life can be read together with primary source materials of the earlier, formative phases.This volume thus supplies the material with which to study the influences – religious, cultural, moral, intellectual and political – that moulded the character and personality of the revolutionary leader of India’s freedom struggle

Across the twentieth century, Asians imagined universalist ideals centered on the idea of Asia itself, rivaling European colonial thought, liberalism, and race-based nationalisms. Sugata Bose explores the history of Asian universalisms and reflects on their potential amid ongoing nationalist rivalries tied to religious majoritarianism and violence.