Jawaharlal Nehru wrote about history even while he was engaged in making history. He demonstrated, through the Letters from a Father to his daughter and the Glimpses of World History, that the subject need not be tedious.
The secret of his success as an amateur (in the sense of non-professional) historian was his perception that history is not something pertaining to the dead past but has relevance to the living present and to the shaping of the future. Inaugurating the Asian History, Congress in New Delhi in December 1961, Jawaharlal Nehru said that he approached history not as a catalogue of kings and dates but as "an exciting story, a developing drama leading up to the present and making me wonder where it will lead to in the future. "3 There is no better cue for the narrator of a tale from the history of any branch of the human family.
The present book tells the story of the regeneration of Indian society which began in the early part of the 19th century with Raja Rammohun Roy and culminated in the freedom struggle. The success of this struggle was marred by the partition of the sub-continent and the blood-bath which accompanied it. These events can be properly understood only in the context of India's long history. The first chapter therefore attempts to present a panorama of this background, stretching over nearly 5000 years. The quick look at the past shows both integrative and disruptive forces at work. The latter made India's society and polity vulnerable to penetration by European colonial powers during the 18th century. The British had become the de facto rulers of a great part of India when the first Governor-General was appointed in
1774. The national awakening which began in the 19th century was characterized by assimilation of the good features of the science and philosophy of the West, to which access was provided by English education, alongside pride in India's own heritage and readiness to purge it of the accretions of superstitious practice. This constrictive response, unaffected by the abortive Uprising of 1857, led on to the formation of the Indian National Congress, the heightened political consciousness reflected in the agitation against the partition of Bengal and finally to the nonviolent mass movement for independence under the leadership of Mahatma Gandhi.
India's freedom struggle had several dimensions besides the political. It brought about social and economic changes even as it proceeded. And it had the vision of greater changes to follow after independence. The freedom movement stimulated and in turn drew inspiration from a flowering of literature in the languages of India. It was a movement of ideas and ideals, some of them mutually reinforcing and others conflicting. The major conflict was between a pan-Indian consciousness transcending differences of religion, caste or language, and the sense of separate identity among certain communities which the British sedulously encouraged in order to divide Indian from Indian so as to consolidate their own rule. The national movement stood for unity amidst diversity based on equality of citizenship rights in a free India. But the forces of separatism fostered by the imperialists triumphed because many Indians, instead of settling their differences among themselves, rose to the bait of the favors held out by the British to members of this religion here and that caste there.
Hindu (935)
Agriculture (118)
Ancient (1086)
Archaeology (753)
Architecture (563)
Art & Culture (910)
Biography (702)
Buddhist (544)
Cookery (167)
Emperor & Queen (565)
Islam (242)
Jainism (307)
Literary (896)
Mahatma Gandhi (372)
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