Seventeen distinguished historians and political scientists discuss the phenomenon of Indian Nationalism, one hundred years after the founding of the Congress party. They offer important new interpretations of Nationalism's evolution during more than six decades of crucial change and rapid growth. As India's foremost political institution, the National Congress with its changing fortunes mirrored Indian aspirations, ideals, dreams, and failures during the country's struggle for nationhood. Many difficulties face by the pre-independence Indian National Congress are critically examined for the first time in this volume. Major times of crisis and transition are considered, as well as the tension between mass action and political control and the problem of creating and maintaining unity in the face of divisive social and economic interests and between deeply hostile religious communities. A composite portrait of the Congress Party emerges. We see a coalition of often conflicting communities and interests much like India itself, struggling to stay together, tenuously united by little more at times than a common "enemy," the imperial British Raj. But linked together in precarious, seemingly haphazard fashion, shifting networks of elite political entrepreneurs manage to keep India's National Congress alive long enough to convince the British that it would be easier to "Quit India" than to try to hang on to it by force. With the abrupt transfer of power form the British to the independent Dominions of India and Pakistan in 1947, Congress provided institutional sinews for the administration of what had been British India and over five hundred Princely States. By contributing to a deeper understanding of India's nationalist experience, this volume may illuminate the experience of other Third World states. Essays by:S. BhattacharyaJudith M. BrownMushirul HansanZoya HasanD.A. LowClaude MarkovitsJohn R. McLaneW.H. Morris-JonesGyanendra PandeyBimal PrasadRajat Kanta RayBarbara N. RamusackPeter D. ReevesHitesranjan SanyalRichard SissonStanley WolpertEleanor Zelliot This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1988.

The celebration of the centenary of the Indian National Congress prompted a scholarly re-examination of that organization in the midst of an active international discussion about the nature of Indian society in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Any group of historians who come together to give fresh consideration to the Congress – its organization, leadership, ideology and support – also join in the wider debate going on in Indian history. This volume, first published in 1991, reflects such an engagement with the full range of contemporary discussion, representing not just scholarship in five different countries but also quite distinct historiographical traditions. It surveys the origins and development of the Congress from its inception to its development up to Independence.

Tracing the history of the Indian National Congress from its founding in 1885 until about 1905, Professor McLane analyzes its efforts to build a national community and to obtain fundamental reforms from the British. In so doing, he extends our understanding of the dynamics of Indian pluralism. In its first two decades of existence, the Congress failed to inspire sacrifices from its members or to attract Muslims or Indians without an English education. The author explains this early stagnation in terms of developments within the Congress as well as outside in Indian society. Originally published in 1978. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

In this volume Dr Seal analyses the social roots of the rather confused stirrings towards political organisations of the 1870s and 1880s which brought about the foundation of the Indian National Congress. He is concerned not only with the politicians, viceroys and civil servants but with the social structure of those parts of India where political movements were most prominent at the time. The emphasis of this work is more upon Indian politics than upon British policy: the associations in Bengal and Bombay, the genesis of the Congress and the Muslim breakaway which accentuated the political divisions in India.

This is the first book to stress the need for study of regional and local politics as an integral part of the history of the Congress.