Violence or Non-Violence? Gandhi and Popular Movements in India, 1915-1950: Context (HIH3168)
|Staff||Dr Gajendra Singh - Convenor|
|Pre-requisites||At least 90 credits of History at Level 1 and/or Level 2.|
|Co-requisites||Violence or Non-Violence? Gandhi and Popular Movements in India, 1915-1950: Sources|
|Duration of Module||Term 1: 11 weeks; Term 2: 11 weeks;|
This module will examine the role played by the ideology and leadership of Mahatma Gandhi in India's struggle for independence. It will, in addition, explore the neglected but equally important part played by social, revolutionary and peasant-based movements in this period. You will be introduced to new perspectives in historical writing which have contested the validity of 'official' accounts of recent Indian history – whether written from a colonialist or nationalist perspective. A study of the historiography will be combined with an analysis of various sources that can be used to produce neo-colonialist, neo-nationalist and postcolonial histories of the Indian independence movement.
ILO: Module-specific skills
- 1. Evaluate the different complex themes in the cultural, social and political histories of the Indian independence movement.
- 2. Make close specialist evaluation of the key developments within the period, developed through independent study and seminar work.
- 3. Analyse the key developments within the nationalist movements in colonial India, and the differences between colonialist, nationalist and postcolonial history-writing.
- 4. Follow the intellectual development of anti-colonial nationalism and the social and cultural movements that acted as its counterpart across the period.
ILO: Discipline-specific skills
- 5. Focus on and comprehend complex issues.
- 6. Understand and deploy relevant historical terminology in a comprehensible manner.
ILO: Personal and key skills
- 7. Conduct independent and autonomous study and group work, including presentation of material for group discussion, developed through the mode of learning.
- 8. Digest, select and organise material to produce, to a deadline, a coherent and cogent argument, developed through the mode of assessment.
- 9. Present complex arguments orally.
Topics will include:
- Gandhi in South Africa
- Gandhi on Film: Popular Representations of the Gandhi Myth
- The First World War in India: Collaboration and Revolution
- Colonial Violence and the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre
- Gandhi and the Early Satyagrahas
- Khilafat and Pan-Islamism
- Non-Cooperation and Chauri Chaura
- Gandhi and Women
- Gandhi and the Untouchables
- The Impact of the Great Depression
- Civil Disobedience
- Princely States
- Jawaharlal Nehru
- Subhas Chandra Bose
- Big Business and Trade Unions
- Revolutionary Nationalisms
- Kisan Sabhas
- Regional Studies (UP, Punjab, Bengal, Gujarat, South India)
- Quit India
- Tebhaga and Telangana
- Gandhi’s Legacy
- Historiography of the Subaltern
- The Freedom Struggle in Literature and Art
Learning activities and teaching methods (given in hours of study time)
|Scheduled Learning and Teaching Activities||Guided independent study||Placement / study abroad|
Details of learning activities and teaching methods
|Category||Hours of study time||Description|
|Scheduled learning and teaching activities||44||22 x 2 hour seminars|
|Guided independent study||256||Reading and preparation for seminars, coursework and presentations|
|Form of assessment||Size of the assessment (eg length / duration)||ILOs assessed||Feedback method|
|Seminar discussion||Ongoing through course||1-7, 9||Verbal from tutor and fellow students|
Summative assessment (% of credit)
|Coursework||Written exams||Practical exams|
Details of summative assessment
|Form of assessment||% of credit||Size of the assessment (eg length / duration)||ILOs assessed||Feedback method|
|Essay||25||3,000 words||1-8||Verbal and written|
|Essay||25||3,000 words||1-8||Verbal and written|
|Unseen exam||50||2 questions in 2 hours||1-8||Verbal and written|
Details of re-assessment (where required by referral or deferral)
|Original form of assessment||Form of re-assessment||ILOs re-assessed||Timescale for re-assessment|
|Two essays||Two essays||1-8||Referral/deferral period|
|Unseen exam||Unseen exam||1-8||Referral/deferral period|
Indicative learning resources - Basic reading
Sumit Sarkar, Modern India, 1885-1947, (New Delhi: Macmillan, 1983).
Sumit Sarkar, Modern Times, 1880s-1950, (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2014).
Crispin Bates, Subalterns and Raj, A History of South Asia Since 1600, (London: Routledge, 2007).
Ayesha Jalal and Sugata Bose, Modern South Asia: History, Culture, Political Economy, (London: Routledge, 1998).
Judith Brown, Modern India: The Origins of an Asian Democracy, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994 2nd edn.).
Judith Brown and Anthony Parel (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Gandhi, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
Bipan Chandra, History of Modern India, (New Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 2009).
R.C. Mazumdar, History of the Freedom Movement in India, Vols. 1-3, (New Delhi: Publications Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, 1961-1972).
William Gould, Religion and Conflict in Modern South Asia, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, Imperial Power and Popular Politics: Class, Resistance and the State in India, 1850-1950, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
Module has an active ELE page?
Indicative learning resources - Web based and electronic resources
South Asia Archive, http://www.southasiaarchive.com
The 1947 Partition Archive, http://www.1947partitionarchive.org
Cinemas of India, http://www.cinemasofindia.com
Colonial Film: Moving Images of the British Empire, http://www.colonialfilm.org.uk
The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (Electronic Book), Vols. 1-98, (New Delhi: Publications Division, Government of India, 1999), http://www.gandhiserve.org/e/cwmg/cwmg.htm
Indicative learning resources - Other resources
Films – Gandhi (1982); The Making of the Mahatma (1996); Lage Rao Munna Bhai (Carry on, Munna) (2006); Gandhi My Father (2007); Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar (2000); Hey Ram (2000).
Novels – Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, (London: 1981); Rabindranath Tagore, The Home and the World, (1916); Rudyard Kipling, Plain Tales from the Hills, (1890); Premchand, Deliverance and Other Stories; Mulk Raj Anand, Untouchable (London: Penguin, 1st published 1935); R. K. Narayan, A Malgudi Omnibus (three novels: Swami and Friends; The Bachelor of Arts and The English Teacher), (London: Vintage, 1999); Saadat Hasan Manto, Mottled Dawn (Penguin, 1998).
Available as distance learning?
Last revision date
Key words search
Violence, Non-violence, Gandhi, India