Taylor C. Sherman – författare

An iconoclastic history of the first two decades after independence in IndiaNehru’s India brings a provocative but nuanced set of new interpretations to the history of early independent India. Drawing from her extensive research over the past two decades, Taylor Sherman reevaluates the role of Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, in shaping the nation. She argues that the notion of Nehru as the architect of independent India, as well as the ideas, policies, and institutions most strongly associated with his premiership—nonalignment, secularism, socialism, democracy, the strong state, and high modernism—have lost their explanatory power. They have become myths.Sherman examines seminal projects from the time and also introduces readers to little-known personalities and fresh case studies, including India’s continued engagement with overseas Indians, the importance of Buddhism in secular India, the transformations in industry and social life brought about by bicycles, a riotous and ultimately doomed attempt to prohibit the consumption of alcohol in Bombay, the early history of election campaign finance, and the first state-sponsored art exhibitions. The author also shines a light on underappreciated individuals, such as Apa Pant, the charismatic diplomat who influenced foreign policy from Kenya to Tibet, and Urmila Eulie Chowdhury, the rebellious architect who helped oversee the building of Chandigarh.Tracing and critiquing developments in this formative period in Indian history, Nehru’s India offers a fresh and definitive exploration of the nation’s early postcolonial era.

Exploring violent confrontation between the state and the population in colonial and postcolonial India, this book is both a study of the many techniques of colonial coercion and state violence and a cultural history of the different ways in which Indians imbued practices of punishment with their own meanings and reinterpreted acts of state violence in their own political campaigns.

This work examines state violence from a historical perspective, expanding the study of punishment beyond the prison by investigating the interplay between imprisonment, corporal punishment, collective fines and state violence. It provides a fresh look at seminal events in the history of mid-twentieth century India, such as the massacre at Jallianwala Bagh, the non-cooperation and civil disobedience movements, the Quit India campaign, and the Hindu-Muslim riots of the 1930s and 1940s. The book extends its analysis into the postcolonial period by considering the ways in which partition and then the struggle against a communist insurgency reshaped practices of punishment and state violence in the first decade after independence. Ultimately, this research challenges prevailing conceptions of the nature of the state in colonial and postcolonial India, which have tended to assume that the state had the ambition and the ability to use the police, military and bureaucracy to dominate the population at will. It argues, on the contrary, that the state in twentieth-century India tended to be self-limiting, vulnerable, and replete with tensions.

Relevant to those interested in contemporary India and the history of empire and decolonisation, this work provides a new framework for the study of state violence which will be invaluable to scholars of South Asian studies; violence, crime and punishment; and colonial and postcolonial history.