About Book
The book examines the social and social psychological processes that led up to the Partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947. It works from a dual corpus: the historians' for medieval and modern India, the sociologists' for Indian society. It moves back and forth between evidence and general, or theoretical, understanding, and focuses on social and psychological processes, placing the strictly political domain on the margin. It recognizes long-term continuities in the idiom of conflict (as well as of cooperation), and shows that, by 1900, the conflicts and the animosities were gathering a self-aggravating momentum.
About Author
Satish Saberwal has retired as Professor, Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, and has also been at the departments of anthropology, University of Alberta and McGill University. He has done fieldwork among the Embu of central Kenya and the lower castes in a Punjabi industrial town, and has an interest in long-term social--historical processes seen comparatively: Europe, China, South Asia. His later publications have included Wages of segmentation: comparative historical studies on Europe and India (1995) and Roots of crisis: interpreting contemporary Indian society (1996); he has co-edited Social conflict (1996) and Rules, laws, constitutions (1998).