ABSTRACT

This book examines how identities are formed and expressed in political, social and cultural contexts across South Asia. It is a comprehensive intervention on how, why and what identities have come to be, and takes a closer look at the complexities of their interactions.

Drawing on an interdisciplinary approach, combining methodologies from history, literary studies, politics, and sociology, this book:

• Explores the multiple ways in which personal and collective identities manifest and engage, are challenged and resisted across time and space.;

• Highlights how the shared history of colonialism and partition, communal violence, bloodshed and pogrom are instrumental in understanding present-day developments in identity politics.;

• Sheds light on a number of current themes such as borders and nations, race and ethnicity, identity politics and fundamentalism, language and regionalism, memory and community, and resistance and assertion.

A key volume in South Asian Studies, this book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of modern South Asian history, politics, sociology, literary studies and social exclusion.

chapter 2|29 pages

Constitution and conflict

Mono-ethnic federalism in a poly-ethnic Nepal

chapter 3|7 pages

Literature as cosmopolitics

Beyond nations, borders and identities

chapter 4|34 pages

Ideology as identity

Progressive Punjabi poetry of the 1970s and after 1

chapter 5|23 pages

Flying high or lying low?

The moral economy of young women in higher education in Punjab, India

chapter 6|20 pages

Dalit assertion and different shades of movements defining Dalits

From accorded nomenclature to asserted one

chapter 7|16 pages

The question of loyalty

Minorities and South Asian nationalisms

chapter 8|14 pages

Adivasi struggles in Chhattisgarh

‘Jal, Jungle, Zameen’

chapter 9|23 pages

Was Bhagat Singh an internationalist?

Resistance and identity in global age