Event Metaphor Memory

Event, Metaphor, Memory

Taking Gandhi's statements about civil disobedience to heart, in February 1922 residents from the villages around the north Indian market town of Chauri Chaura attacked the local police station, burned it to the ground and murdered twenty-three constables. Appalled that his teachings were turned to violent ends, Gandhi called off his Noncooperation Movement and fasted to bring the people back to nonviolence. In the meantime, the British government denied that the riot reflected Indian resistance to its rule and tried the rioters as common criminals. These events have taken on great symbolic importance among Indians, both in the immediate region and nationally. Amin examines the event itself, but also, more significantly, he explores the ways it has been remembered, interpreted, and used as a metaphor for the Indian struggle for independence. The author, who was born fifteen miles from Chauri Chaura, brings to his study an empathetic knowledge of the region and a keen ear for the nuances of the culture and language of its people. In an ingenious negotiation between written and oral evidence, he combines brilliant archival work in the judicial records of the period with field interviews with local informants. In telling this intricate story of local memory and the making of official histories, Amin probes the silences and ambivalences that contribute to a nation's narrative. He extends his boundaries well beyond Chauri Chaura itself to explore the complex relationship between peasant politics and nationalist discourse and the interplay between memory and history.

Event, Metaphor, Memory

The Routledge Handbook of Subalterns across History

Subaltern Studies has marked both a major departure in South Asian studies and indexed broader shifts in the critical humanities and social sciences. This volume explores what it means today to set to work studies of subaltern subjects in our rapidly mutating social worlds. This handbook spans diverse historical, ethnographic, and geopolitical spaces, drawing in the Antipodes and the Americas, Diasporas and Oceanic worlds, Africa and the Middle East, apart from Europe and many South Asias – overlapping arenas in which the “subaltern” continues to find distinct yet substantive articulations. It also seeks to meaningfully juxtapose practices and processes of gender and race; indigeneity and indenture; age and sexuality; slavery and apartheid; the Adivasi and the Dalit; settler-colonialisms and nations; nature and environment; caste and tribe; diaspora and blackness; capital and property; science and technology; media and cinema; the body and dance; heteronormativity and queerness; state and governance; and politics and justice. In these ways, the study un-frames disciplinary boundaries and maps emergent terrains, exactly articulating pressing subjects and rethinking distinct subalternities. This book is aimed at researchers, scholars, and advanced undergraduate and graduate students in the critical human sciences, especially history, anthropology, social theory, and cultural, gender, and literary studies.