kailash chandra jha (3 Ergebnisse)

Zustand: New.

Hardcover. Zustand: New. 1st Edition. On December 5th, 1920, in Patna, the Dasnami Sannyasi Sahajanand Saraswati encountered Mahatma Gandhi for the first time. Sahajanand was already known in social-reform circles in Bihar as an energetic activist and educator working to promote bhumihar Brahman identity. Inspired by the Mahatma radical reformulation of Indian nationalism, 'the Swami' (as Sahajanand would soon come to be known) threw himself into nationalist politics and the Indian National Congress. Within a decade, moved by the plight of tenant-farmers struggling against excessive rent demands and abusive landlord 'extractions', the Swami had spearheaded the formation of the Bihar provincial Kisan Sabha. This organization quickly became the largest organization of its kind in India, catapulting the Swami onto the National stage. By the early mid-1930s the Swami had publicly broken with both the Mahatma and the 'Gandhian' and had made common cause with the left wing of the Congress. Later, as the storm clouds of world War II gathered on the horizon, he joined forces with the forward Bloc and the Communist party of India. By the time of his death in 1950, The Swami, disillusioned with politics, had dissociated himself from all parties. This pioneering 1961 Study by Walter Hauser, tracks the history of the Bihar peasant movement as it both influenced and was buffeted by National and international politics. Hauser offers here a penetrating analysis of the character of the movement and the mind of its leader as he grappled with and gravitated toward marxism-leninism in the 1930s and 1940s. Initially written as a phd dissertation at the University of Chicago, Hauser's path-breaking Bihar provincial Kisan Sabha, 1929-1942 is now being published in its entirety for the first time. The volume includes a 'foreword' by one of Hauser's many students, William R. Pinch.

Hardcover. Zustand: New. Zustand des Schutzumschlags: New. 1st Edition. India's twentieth century struggle for political freedom was and remains an epic achievement in the human experience. Quite apart from its global influence, this is perhaps as familiar a story as it is remarkable given the legacy of Gandhi, among others of that small generation of founders, whose unique leadership roles are rightly considered to have been transformational in the achievement of freedom in 1947, and in the promulgation on the Constitution of January 1950. But it must then also be said that the roles of the founding leadership were balanced and in many ways defined by the people of India themselves, primarily its peasants, whether the generic masses of Gandhi's definition and direction, or the Independent and self aware peasants of the field. It is this broader peasant story, and particularly that of the deeply engaged peasants of the Kisan Andolan, the peasant movement of the late 1920s and the 1930s, that appears here in the words of Swami Sahajanand Saraswati. It was their shared experience, or as Sahajanand put it more pointedly and more accurately, their common struggle. In fact, Sahajanand and the peasants had lived this history, and the Swami recorded it for posterity in his 1952 Hindi memoir Mera Jivan Sangharsh (My Life Struggle), translated here for the first time by Walter Hauser and Kailash Jha. Given Sahajanand's direct involvement in this history, his representation of the peasant story from the perspective of the peasants amounts to a paradigm shift in how the lives of the peasants of India have been understood and represented over time, either in politics or in scholarship. The intimacy, detail, and ethnographic richness of peasant activism as conveyed by Sahajanand is simply unique. This is true for many reasons, not least because the peasants understood fully what their struggles and movement meant, not only in social, cultural, and economic terms, but equally so in political conceptual, and ultimately in human terms. It was their voice, loud and clear, and hence their history. (jacket).