Shahid Amin

Chauri Chaura 1922-1992

Event, Metaphor, Memory

A study of the sugarcan production processes of peasants in the Gorakhpur region of India, examining the conditions under which the reproduction of small peasant economies came to be dependent on sugarcane for the market. The author addresses the questions of what happens to peasant producers, their production processes, and their relationship with the traditionally dominant agrarian classes; how the additional presence of capitalist enterprise impinges on the peasantry; and what role the colonial state plays through its pricing and marketing policies.

An Inquiry Into Peasant Production for Capitalist Enterprise in Colonial India

Sugarcane and Sugar in Gorakhpur

Dipesh Chakrabarty

Contributed articles and some papers presented at the Conference on Subalternity and Culture, held at Hyderabad in January 1993.

Writings on South Asian History and Society

Subaltern Studies

Saurabh Dube

Professor of History Center for Asian and African Studies Saurabh Dube

Brings Into Mutual Dialogue Landmark Writings On Entire And Modernity, State And Nation And Colonial Questions And Post Colonial Problems-This Address A New Contentions Questions Of Historical Representation And Cultural Understanding. Divided Into 3 Parts With 15 Contributors.

Contemporary History-writing on India

Postcolonial Passages

Conquest and Community, by prize-winning historian Shahid Amin, is a kaleidoscopic look into one of the most divisive issues in South Asian history: the Turkic conquest of the subcontinent and the subsequent spread of Muslim rule. Covering more than eight hundred years of history, the book centers around the enduringly popular saint Ghazi Miyan, the youthful and lovable soldier of Islam to whom shrines have been erected all over the country. After detailing the warrior saint s supposed exploits, Amin charts the various ways he has been remembered throughout the last millennium. As he shows, the charming stories, ballads, and proverbs that grew up around him domesticated the bloody conquest and made it appear both virtuous and familial. Amin brings the story of Ghazi Miyan s long afterlife into the contemporary period through his ethnographic analysis of the still-active shrines as sites of interreligious public piety. What is at first glance a story of just one mythical figure becomes through Amin s thoughtful treatment an allegory for the history of Hindu-Muslim relations over an astonishingly long period of time. As the Muslim conquest of India is being mobilized for dangerously polarizing political ends in India today, this nonsectarian account of religious strife will be a timely and sane contribution to the vexed historical debate."

Shahid Amin

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