The Politics of the Urban Poor in Early Twentieth-Century India

by Nandini Gooptu

Overview

Nandini Gooptu's magisterial history of the Indian urban poor represents a tour-de-force. By focusing on the role of the poor in caste, religious and national politics, the author demonstrates how they emerged as a major social factor in South Asia during the interwar period. The empirical material provides compelling insights into what it meant to be poor and how the impoverished dealt with their predicament. In this way, the book contributes to some of the most crucial debates on the nature of subaltern politics and consciousness.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521443661
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	07/05/2001
Series:	Cambridge Studies in Indian History and Society , #8
Pages:	490
Product dimensions:	5.98(w) x 9.02(h) x 1.26(d)
Lexile:	1890L (what's this?)

Table of Contents

List of tables; Acknowledgements; List of abbreviations; Select glossary; 1. The study and its perspectives; Part I. Changing Conditions and Experiences in Interwar North India: 2. The poor in the urban setting; 3. Urban local policies and the poor; 4. Urban policing and the poor; Part II. Modes of Political Action and Perception: 5. Untouchable assertion; 6. Militant Hinduism; 7. Resurgent Islam; 8. Nationalist action; 9. Congress socialist mobilisation; 10. The politics of exclusion and the 'virtuous deprived'; Bibliography; Index.

Editorial Reviews

"...a major addition to twentieth-century Indian history. It deserves to be read widely, and its arguments for the centrality of social exclusion and economic deprivation in the formation of the political consciousness of the urban poor are deserving of greater investigation, both in the past and the present." Journal of Social History

From the Publisher