SOUTH ASIA IN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE: Freedom, Life and Dignity

Description

This is a collection of the revised and enlarged articles published earlier except a few newly added papers. The main issue in this collection is how the people in South Asia responded to the call of ‘Power to the People’ in the times of the war and the struggle for freedom. While describing the central theme, Quit India movement in India, the author paid heed to the response of the common people who could not participate in the movement or could participate only for a few days. Freedom movement in India during the Second World War was the struggle for life with dignity too, facing the savage military repression and serious food scarcity.

Through his review articles, the author tried to show that the history of each area in South Asia in the 1940s and 1950s was interrelated. The reference to Bihar and the people who live there in various parts of the book is, in its own way, an invitation to the Area Studies on many parts of South Asia too.

Rahul Sankrityayan saw the history of Japan in the 1930s with his critical eyes in the context of the situation in East Asia where he visited in 1935, and also led the peasant struggle in Amwari, Bihar in 1939. Here he throws light on the memorable scenes in the midst of the Quit India movement at Patna as the witness.

Sho Kuwajima is Professor Emeritus of South Asian Studies, Osaka University of Foreign Studies. He studied at the Indian School of International Studies in 1962-66, and was Senior Fellow at the Indian Council of Social Science Research in 1988-90.

He is the author of Muslims, Nationalism and the Partition: 1946 Provincial Elections in India, Manohar, New Delhi, 1998 (Reprint 2020), The Mutiny in Singapore: War, Anti-War and the War for India’s Independence, Rainbow Publishers, New Delhi, 2006, Muslims, Nation and the World: Life and Thought of Abul Hashim, Leader of the Bengal Muslim League, LG Publishers Distributors, Delhi, 2015 and Peasants and Peasant Leaders in Contemporary History: A Case of Bihar in India from the same publisher in 2017.

He recorded his interview with an Indian peasant leader in 1966 as Sakshatkar: Bihar ke Kisan Neta Pandit Jadunandan Sharma se Batchit (in Hindi), Pratyaksh Prakashan, Patna, 1996. He also translated Swami Sahajanand Saraswati’s Kisan Sabha ke Sansmaran (in Hindi) into Japanese, Sagano Shoin, Kyoto, 2002. Besides, he edited Life, Freedom and War: Twentieth Century South Asia, Aakar Books, Delhi, 2010.