Lineages of the Present: Ideology and Politics in Contemporary South Asia

New
Paperback
2002
$28.60

In March 1998, India broke a quarter-century's silence when it detonated a series of nuclear devices in the Rajasthan desert. Having announced it possessed the credentials for membership in the nuclear club in 1974, India quickly disavowed any desire to join, pledging not to develop its capability further. The Pokhran explosions revealed that promise to have been broken. The principal beneficiary of its breaking was a right-wing government seeking to shore up its shaky base with commitment to the Hindu bomb. While most in the West were taken unawares by this sudden bellicosity in the land of Gandhi, more scrupulous observers on the Indian scene insisted it had a clear history. In this, his first book since the hotly debated In Theory, Aijaz Ahmad untangles many of the intertwined threads of historical and political traditions in a still-too-poorly-understood region of the world.

Synopsis

In March 1998, India broke a quarter-century's silence when it detonated a series of nuclear devices in the Rajasthan desert. Having announced it possessed the credentials for membership in the nuclear club in 1974, India quickly disavowed any desire to join, pledging not to develop its capability further. The Pokhran explosions revealed that promise to have been broken. The principal beneficiary of its breaking was a right-wing government seeking to shore up its shaky base with commitment to the Hindu bomb. While most in the West were taken unawares by this sudden bellicosity in the land of Gandhi, more scrupulous observers on the Indian scene insisted it had a clear history. In this, his first book since the hotly debated In Theory, Aijaz Ahmad untangles many of the intertwined threads of historical and political traditions in a still-too-poorly-understood region of the world.

$28.60

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More Information

Format: Paperback
Pages: 382
Edition: Re-issue
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 15 Apr 2002
ISBN 10: 1859843581
ISBN 13: 9781859843581

Media Reviews

At least let it be understood that India bears more ultimate responsibility for the Kashmir troubles than Pakistan, and that the confrontation between India and Pakistan would be a far less dangerous thing had it not been for the BJP's communal thrust at home and its attempt to turn India into a nuclear great power abroad... Nowhere else in the world, as the left-wing analyst and journalist Aijaz Ahmad says, have nuclear threats been so lightly thrown around. -- Guardian

Author Bio

Aijaz Ahmad is Professorial Fellow at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library in New Delhi, India, and Professor of Political Science at York University in Ontario, Canada. He is the author of In Theory; Classes, Nations, Literatures, also from Verso.