Continuing dilemmas : understanding social consciousness
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Continuing dilemmas : understanding social consciousness
Tulika Books, 2002
Available at 2 libraries
  Aomori
  Iwate
  Miyagi
  Akita
  Yamagata
  Fukushima
  Ibaraki
  Tochigi
  Gunma
  Saitama
  Chiba
  Tokyo
  Kanagawa
  Niigata
  Toyama
  Ishikawa
  Fukui
  Yamanashi
  Nagano
  Gifu
  Shizuoka
  Aichi
  Mie
  Shiga
  Kyoto
  Osaka
  Hyogo
  Nara
  Wakayama
  Tottori
  Shimane
  Okayama
  Hiroshima
  Yamaguchi
  Tokushima
  Kagawa
  Ehime
  Kochi
  Fukuoka
  Saga
  Nagasaki
  Kumamoto
  Oita
  Miyazaki
  Kagoshima
  Okinawa
  Korea
  China
  Thailand
  United Kingdom
  Germany
  Switzerland
  France
  Belgium
  Netherlands
  Sweden
  Norway
  United States of America
Note
Includes bibliographical references and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
The central argument in this collection of essays by Sudhir Chandra, written over a period of thirty-five years, is that contemporary social consciousness is marked by an underlying ambivalence that resists analysis in terms of neat binary categories. Exploring the interplay of contradictory impulses and the confluence of apparently irreconcilable forces in the making of social and political phenomena, the essays deal with a wide range of issues concerning our colonial past and the postcolonial present. They reflect the author's inclination to view social/political/historical movements and personalities in terms of an ever-varying mix of what we are taught to look upon, normatively or/and analytically, as opposites. Trained as a historian, the author deals with the early stirrings of the nationalist consciousness in nineteenth-century India to show that the same person or group of persons or movement often revealed both progressive and reactionary attitudes. This counters the received wisdom which views these as sets of oppositions - reformist versus revivalist, secular versus religious, nationalist versus communalist.
The ambivalence, further, reveals itself equally in the texts of nineteenth-century writers and in cataclysmic events like Hindu-Muslim riots in the Gujarat of today. Two essays devoted to Govardhanram Tripathi, a rarely researched Gujarati litterateur, bring out the unresolved contradictions that underlay his own consciousness and that of his society. More than a century later, the post-1992 riots in Surat and the Hindutva terror unleashed in other parts of Gujarat in 2002 reveal the vulnerability of broader social forces. Gandhi's realization of the failure of swadeshi in the wake of the Noakhali riots, as indeed the dilemma posed by his attitude to religious conversion, further prove the point. Rather than being a unique rupture, he emerges as a fulfilment of intimations that the nineteenth century abounded in. Even if it could be seen as a universal human condition, the essays remind us, ambivalence is always specific, unfolding the dynamics of social forces. That is what human history is all about.
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