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"Millions in India have long been obsessed with the vicissitudes of the Nehru-Gandhi familys fate. Inextricably linked to the ups and downs of their lives was the future of the nation itself. It was Jawaharlal Nehrus leadership that guided India onto the world stage as a modern nation. Despite the varied scholarship of Nehruvian studies, one important aspect, the experiences of the Nehrus in prison during the national movement, has received only scant consideration. This book addresses that omission by highlighting the significance of prison time in shaping the lives of the members of this illustrious family. For Motilal and Jawaharlal Nehru, Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, and Krishna Hutheesing, among others, serving prison time was much more than just a marker of participation in the Independence movement. The grim walls of jail provided the place and time to the Nehrus to reflect on and give direction to the nationalist struggle. Such important literary works as Glimpses of World History and The Discovery of India, which remain timeless in their appeal, were crafted in gaol. In tracing the intellectual biography of the Nehru-Gandhi family, this book documents the ethos of an entire era during the colonial period."

"Although the filmmaker Satyajit Ray is well known across the world, few outside Bengal know much about the diverse contributions of his forebears to printing technology, nationalism, childrens literature, feminism, advertising, entrepreneurialism, and religious reform. Indeed, even within Bengal, the earlier Rays are often very inadequately known and associated exclusively with childrens literature. The first study in English of the multifarious interests and accomplishments of the Ray family and its collateral branches, The Rays before Satyajit reconstructs the multidimensional Ray saga and interweaves it with the larger history of Indian modernity. While eager to learn from the West and rarely drawn to simple-minded nationalism, the Rays, at their best, shunned mere imitation and sought to create forms of the modern that were thoroughly Indian and enthusiastically cosmopolitan. Some of the outcomes of this quest, such as Upendrakishore Rays innovations in half-tone photography and block-making, were admired in the West, though the metropolitan careers of colonial innovators, the book shows, were inevitably constrained by forces beyond their control. Within India and Bengal, however, many of the Rays innovations were of enduring significance, and when situated in their contexts, they help us understand the tensions and contradictions of the pursuit of modernity in an economy that was neither capitalistic nor politically autonomous. Ranging across the history of religion, literature, science, technology, and entrepreneurial culture, The Rays before Satyajit is not only the first collective biography of an extraordinary family but also a book that illuminates the history of Indian modernity from a new perspective."

"In its most brutal form, the prison in British India was an instrument of the colonial state for instilling fear and dealing with resistance. Exploring the lived experience of select political prisoners, this volume presents their struggles and situates them against the backdrop of the freedom movement. From Mohamed Ali, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, the Nehru family, and Gandhi, to communists like M.N. Roy, we get a vivid glimpse of their lives within the confines of the prison in a narrative that is at times deeply personal and yet political. The struggles of some remarkable women of the time are also brought to the fore, be it the feisty doctor Rashid Jahan, Aruna Ali, Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, or Sarojini Naidu. Extensively researched, the volume draws upon the records at the National Archives of India, private papers, creative writings of the prisoners, newspapers, memoirs, biographies, and autobiographies. The volume also brings to light the differences between Indian and European prisons during the colonial period and the conception of criminal classes in the colony. Capturing the sharp pangs of loneliness, the poetry born out of solitude, and the burning desire for independence, Roads to Freedom breathes new life into accounts and tales long forgotten."

"The author shows how the struggle for India was not only with British colonialism and imperialism, but also with itself and its past. He traces the religious and social reforms that laid the groundwork for the modern sub-continental state, proposed and advocated in English by the native voices that influenced the formation India’s society. Merging culture, politics, language, and literature."

"Around the turn of the nineteenth century, the northwestern littoral of India, largely comprising of Gujarat, Kathiawad, Cutch, and Sind, was battered by piratical raids. These attacks disrupted coastal trade and embarrassed the English East India Company by defying the very boundaries of law and sovereignty that the Company was trying to impose. Who were these pirates whom the Company described as small-time crooks habituated to a life of raiding and thieving? How did they perceive themselves? What did they mean when they insisted that theft was their livelihood and that it enjoyed the sanction of God? Exploring the phenomenon and politics of predation in the region, Lakshmi Subramanian teases out a material history of piracy, locating its antecedents, its social context, and its ramifications, during a crucial period of political turbulence marked by global expansion of commercial exchanges headed by the Company. She investigates the fissures within the colonial project of law and anti-piracy regulations and, through the lens of maritime politics, unravels the skeins of a distinct mode of subaltern protest. By systematically unpacking the category of piracy as it was constituted by the legal discourse of the English East India Company, she revisits the idea of legal pluralism in the Indian Ocean and considers the possibility of looking at piracy as an expression of resistance by littoral society."