Nehru - Benjamin Zachariah

Parsis would be the ‘communities’ represented. (The Backward Castes’ spokesman, Dr B.R. Ambedkar, when he expressed his surprise ...

into a pathological pattern of mutual psychological dependence – the British position as the arbitrating authority encouraged ap ...

Asia – with an avowed anti-imperialist at the head of government. Wavell had done to Nehru in government what Gandhi had been ac ...

historian’s inability to get into other people’s bedrooms or private spaces retrospectively, it is undeniable that close persona ...

of the country as a whole. Mountbatten would be the judge of the sincerity of such measures not as viceroy but in his personal c ...

now get was what he had once dismissed as a ‘mangy’ and ‘moth-eaten Pakistan’, and what Nehru had described as ‘a gift not worth ...

neatness hid many diverse tensions and fractures, lines of solidarity and conflict. It was far from clear that anyone had wanted ...

INTERLUDE – ENVISIONING THE NEW INDIA At the stroke of the midnight hour, India awoke to freedom of a kind, as well as to a host ...

to the inauguration of the Republic of India on January 26, 1950. This was a time when a creative intellect had great scope for ...

expertise as ways of achieving ‘modern’ social and economic goals – even by the Gandhians, who tried to redefine the ‘modern’ in ...

increasingly sought to identify itself with the nation as a whole, and through the nation with the state. So the equation the Co ...

The Congress had, therefore, to be built into a party, with an organi- sation and discipline, and to find equations to run the s ...

justify Pakistan by making explicit what many Muslim League and other Muslim publicists had often said: that the Congress’s clai ...

Nehru had put his mind to this problem while in jail during the war. It was not a subject to which he was naturally inclined: he ...

Historically, India was ‘like some ancient palimpsest on which layer upon layer of thought and reverie had been inscribed, and y ...

‘sturdy peasants’, but was not true, for instance, of the north-eastern ‘tribal’ territories of India that were to be inherited ...

would only last a short time, until June 1948 at the latest – the projected date of British departure according to Attlee’s anno ...

Assembly now that he had been anointed as ‘Father of the Nation’, was not a member of the Assembly or a participant in its debat ...

‘As evidence of the enduring quality of the 1935 Act,’ Alan Campbell- Johnson, Mountbatten’s press attaché noted in his diary af ...

freedom to ‘practise and propagate’ their religion, but the State and its organs would neither recognise nor support particular ...