individualism, collective agency, and India
- Categories
- Book/Boek
- Creator
- Bose, Purnima
- Publish Year
- 2003
- Shelfmark
- B4829 - B
- Thesaurus
- imperialisme, kolonialisme, nationalisme, individualisering, 20e eeuw, India
- Description
- Organizing Empire examines how concepts of individualism functioned to support and resist British imperialism in India. Through readings of British colonial and Indian nationalist narratives that emerged in parliamentary debates, popular colonial histories, newsletters, memoirs, biographies, and novels, Purnima Bose investigates the ramifications of reducing collective activism to individual intentions. Paying particular attention to the construction of gender, she shows that ideas of individualism rhetorically and theoretically bind colonials, feminists, nationalists, and neocolonials to one another. From a historically grounded, feminist perspective, Bose offers four case studies. She looks at the parliamentary debates on the Amritsar Massacre of 1919, in which several hundred unarmed Indian protesters were killed: Margaret Cousins’s firsthand account of feminist organizing in Ireland and India: Kalpana Dutt’s memoir of the Bengali terrorist movement of the 1930s, which was modeled in part on Irish anticolonial activity: and the popular histories generated by ex-colonial officials and their wives.