Bøker av Janaki Nair

An accessible contribution to the ongoing discussion about the quality and politics of social science textbooks in India.   More than ever before, the school history textbook in India has become an embattled object and the subject of many contestations from both above and below. It is vulnerable not only to the political vagaries of governments but also to the exclusive claims of myriad communities and groups to their sense of the past. What is the future of India's textbook, arguably the most important repository of the country's national past? Is a single teachable past even possible any longer?   In this essay, Janaki Nair uses the Indian predicament to discuss the possibility of building up a "historical temper" in the Indian classroom. Sharing examples from her unique position as a professional historian with sustained experience in the field of pedagogy, Nair invites reflections on the prospect of cultivating a historical temper that can help the teacher equip students to grapple with history.

After seventy-five years of independence, the history of Pakistan remains centered on the state, its ideology and the two-nation theory. Towards Peoples' Histories in Pakistan seeks to shift that focus away from histories of an imagined nation, to the history of its peoples. Based on the premise that the historiographical tradition in Pakistan has ignored the existence of people who actually make history, this book brings together historians, anthropologists, sociologists and political scientists to shed light on the diverse histories of the people themselves.Assembling histories of events and peoples missing from grand narratives of national history, the essays in this collection incorporate a diversity of approaches to the past as it opens the possibilities of multiple histories, the archives through which they are registered, and the various temporalities in which they persist. The volume highlights and recuperates the entangled nature of history and memory within Pakistan's social and cultural life. By critically examining both leftist and nationalist thought, Towards People's Histories in Pakistan explores competing visions of what is meant by 'the people', and charts new ground in developing the promise of people's histories both within Pakistan and beyond.

Educational practices in India have been curiously deficient in providing alternatives to the inherited colonial system of education. Those offered by Gandhi and Tagore, the two best-known exceptions, were ignored after 1947. Un/Common Schooling is a collection of writings by idealistic and enterprising individuals who founded alternative schools in India, located mostly in remote villages with little or no access to basic civic amenities, from the 1970s to the present that highlights the philosophies and rationale behind such schools. A serious reflection on what constitutes alternative , these narratives are animated by key questions: How are learning and life skills defined? Is building capacity for autonomy and creativity as important as imparting encashable skills? What are the chances of those who were largely excluded from schooling finding meaning and value in the classroom conventional or alternative? These are inspiring stories of building institutions to reach first-generation learners in some of the most marginal sections of Indian society, and narrate the manifold challenges that were encountered in starting, running and sustaining these alternatives that counter the inadequate and unequal system of education today. Un/Common Schooling also reflects on interviews with students who passed through the Alternative Education Network, as well as those who sought educational credentials, what it meant to them and how it impacted their lives. The essays therefore provide an empathetic understanding of even the unexpected outcomes of these experiments in pedagogy, making the book a vital addition to the history and sociology of education in India. The book will serve as an invaluable resource for researchers and practitioners in the fields of education, development studies, and public policy, while also serving as an important archive of a crucial moment in Indian education.

This book connects the history of labour movements with the transformation of workplace relations in South Asia from the late 19th century to the 1930s. Contending that labour conflicts in the Bengal jute industry must be understood against the backdrop of a radical change in the organisation of work in this period, Sailer shows how this led to a rupture in worker's relations in the workplace and beyond. Moving away from polarities such as class/culture or modernity/tradition and reconsidering the context around industrial conflicts in this period, Workplace relations in Colonial Bengal offers a new framework to analyse the changing organisation of work in colonial India, and identifies the implications for worker relations both inside and outside the factory. Focusing on a major colonial era industry, this book opens up new perspectives n the history of workers and colonial capitalism in modern India.

This volume reconsiders India's 20th century though a specific focus on the concepts, conjunctures and currency of its distinct political imaginaries. Spanning the divide between independence and partition, it highlights recent historical debates that have sought to move away from a nation-centred mode of political history to a broader history of politics that considers the complex contexts within which different political imaginaries emerged in 20th century India. Representing the first attempt to grasp the shifting modes and meanings of the 'political' in India, this book explores forms of mass protest, radical women's politics, civil rights, democracy, national wealth and mobilization against the indentured-labor system, amongst other themes. In linking 'the political' to shifts in historical temporality, Political Imaginaries in 20th century India extends beyond the interdisciplinary arena of South Asian studies to cognate late colonial and post-colonial formations in the twentieth century and contribute to the 'political turn' in scholarship.

This book explores the aesthetic forms of the political left across the borders of post-colonial, post-partition South Asia. Spanning India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan and Bangladesh, the contributors study art, film, literature, poetry and cultural discourse to illuminate the ways in which political commitment has been given aesthetic form and artistic value by artists and by cultural and political activists in postcolonial South Asia. With a focused conceptualization this volume asks: Does the political left in South Asia have a recognizable aesthetic form? And if so, what political effects do left-wing artistic movements and aesthetic artefacts have in shaping movements against inequality and injustice? Reframing political aesthetics within a postcolonial and decolonised framework, the contributors detail the trajectories and transformations of left-wing cultural formations and affiliations and focus on connections and continuities across post-1947/8 India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh.

Rethinking modernity in colonial and postcolonial Indian history