narrative of the economic history of India is available in Dietmar
Rothermund, An Economic History of India(2nd edition, Routledge, 1993).
Published documents contained in the Transfer of Powerseries published
by Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, or the Towards Freedomvolumes
currently being published by the Indian Council for Historical Research
(the present Government of India’s attempts to censor some volumes
of these collections, awaiting publication, will hopefully not be successful)
are important sources for their respective periods. Contemporary news-
papers are also useful. Works on specific themes and periods are dealt with
below.
On British imperial durbarsand the invented traditions of colonial rule
in India, see Bernard Cohn, ‘Representing Authority in Victorian India’, in
Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds), The Invention of Tradition
(Cambridge University Press, 1983). On the question of the formation of
‘Indian’ identities, see Bernard Cohn, ‘The Census, Social Structure and
Objectification in South Asia’, in An Anthropologist among the Historians and
other essays(Oxford University Press, 1986); and Nicholas Dirks, Castes of
Mind(Princeton University Press, 2001). On Indian nationalism, see Partha
Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative
Discourse?(Zed Books, 1986); Sudipta Kaviraj, ‘The Imaginary Institution of
India’, in Partha Chatterjee and Gyanendra Pandey (eds), Subaltern Studies
VII(Oxford University Press, 1992); Sudipta Kaviraj, ‘On the Structure of
Nationalist Discourse’, in T.V. Sathyamurthy (ed.), Social Change and
Political Discourse in India, Volume 1: State and Nation in the Context of Social
Change(Oxford University Press, 1994); Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and
its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories(Princeton University Press,
1993). For a different view, see Peter van der Veer, Religious Nationalism:
Hindus and Muslims in India(University of California Press, 1994).
On the period of Gandhi’s ascendancy, the ideological context is best
provided by Gandhi’s own writings: see his autobiography, The Story of My
Experiments with Truth(Penguin, 1982), first published in two volumes in
1927 and 1929; and Anthony Parel (ed.), Hind Swaraj and other writings
(Cambridge University Press, 1997). For work on the period, see Ravinder
Kumar (ed.), Essays on Gandhian Politics: the Rowlatt Satyagraha of 1919
(Clarendon Press, 1971); Gail Minault, The Khilafat Movement(Columbia
University Press, 1982); Shahid Amin, ‘Gandhi as Mahatma’, in Ranajit
Guha (ed.), Subaltern Studies III(Oxford University Press, 1984); Sumit
Sarkar, ‘The Logic of Gandhian Nationalism: Civil Disobedience and the
Gandhi-Irwin Pact (1930–31)’, Indian Historical ReviewIII 1, 1976. See also
Judith Brown, Gandhi, Prisoner of Hope(Yale University Press, 1989), the
culmination of a career spent studying Gandhi. (Bizarre omissions include
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