Illinois Global Institute

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Welcome to the calendar of the Illinois Global Institute. We are home to 10 longstanding international area studies centers and thematic programs. Bringing the units together as part of the IGI will improve organizational support, raise visibility, and foster additional cross-campus collaboration on essential international programs

Indian Studies Lecture. Complete Political Independence: The Curious Genealogy of a Nationalist Indian Demand

Event Type: Lecture
Sponsor: India Studies Fund
Location: Levis Faculty Center, 919 W Illinois St, Urbana, IL 61801
Date: Feb 21, 2024 4:00 pm
Speaker: Dr. Mrinalini Sinha, Professor of History at the University of Michigan
Contact: Center for South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies
E-Mail: csames@illinois.edu
Views: 187
Originating Calendar: CSAMES events; The Indian National Congress, the mainstream old anti-colonial political institution in British India, passed a resolution in 1929 in which it officially demanded complete political independence for India from the British Empire. The question of political independence – against other modes of exit from the existing colonial situation – had been in the air for at least a few decades before the Congress signed on to it. Although immortalized immediately afterward in the famous Gandhi-led Salt Satyagraha against the British in 1930, the historical conditions that had necessitated the resolution in the first place have remained obscure. This talk will attempt to defamiliarize the history of this political demand. It does so by locating the question of the future of India alongside the future of Indians in the British empire. It aims to intervene in both a long-standing scholarship that had naturalized the transition from empires to nations and in the recent academic fascination with political forms that offered an alternative to or bypassed the nation-state.

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