Jaipur • New Delhi • Bengaluru • Guwahati • Kolkata
This book examines instances of transformative
dissent, turning points or shifts in popular mobilisation patterns in
contemporary India, while adopting a historical approach and analysing past
events. Exploring the different continuities and discontinuities in mobilising
patterns and dissident agency in India, the authors present a heterogeneous
insurrectional pattern that pivoted around issues of caste, class, religion,
land reform, labour, taxation and territorial control, with anti-colonialism
movements becoming prominent in the first half of the twentieth century. The
authors move beyond this to explore more recent templates of mobilisation which
surfaced towards the end of the twentieth century, during India’s
liberalisation period. With growing marketisation and technological
advancement, unprecedented changes in social relations, growing economic
opportunities and cultural transfusion taking place, the country became a ‘New
India’ - one which aspired to be a global player in the wider technological
public sphere. Tracing the historical trajectories of social movements in
India, this book examines recent trends in digitised dissidence and explores
new frontiers of protests, providing fresh insights for those researching the
history of social movements, South Asian and Indian history and postcolonial
studies.
1. Introduction:
Past Dissidence and Contemporary Cyber-Publics—Popular Protests in India
2. Historicizing
Social Conflicts, Its Major Strands: Ancient, Colonial and Early Postcolonial
India
3. Second
Democratic Upsurge, Liberalization and New India: Post-1970s Socio-Political
Mobilizations
4. Semiology
and Simulacrum: Post-1990s and Virtual Transformation of Popular Dissent
5. New
Grammar of Protests in Contemporary India: Few Case Studies
Anindya Sekhar Purakayastha is Professor in the
Department of English and Coordinator in the Centre for Critical Social Inquiry
at Kazi Nazrul University in India. Previously, he was a Fulbright Fellow at
the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in the USA. He works on postcolonial
violence and literary cultural responses. He co-edits Kairos, the journal of
the Postcolonial Studies Association of the Global South.
Manas Dutta is Assistant Professor in the Department
of History at Aliah University in India, and his current area of research
covers issues related to war and conflict in South Asia, with a special focus
on civil-military relations in the Global South. Manas was a Fellow in
the Institute of Critical Social Inquiry, New School for Social Research,
USA in 2018.
Tirthankar Ghosh is Assistant Professor in the
Department of History at Kazi Nazrul University in India. His areas of
specialisation are the social history of disaster, the ecological and
environmental history of India, the economic history of India and social and
political movements in colonial and post-colonial India
