Imagining the Indian nationalist movement

Revolutionary metaphors in imagery of the freedom struggle

Bibliographic Data

ID2391027
AuthorsKama Maclean (0000-0002-8562-5696, University of New South Wales, Kensington, Australia, corresponding author)
Year2014
Volume19
Issue1
Pages7-34
Publication date2014-03-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of Material Culture (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1359-1835 • E-ISSN: 1460-3586
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/1359183513502408
OpenAlexW2154313344
LanguageEN
Citations received9
References cited23

Recent interventions suggest that the history of India's nationalist movement might be profitably reconstructed with reference to visual culture as a way of counteracting both dominant Congress teleologies and the colonial prejudices embedded in governmental records. This article furthers this hypothesis by undertaking a close examination of Desh Chintan, a rich nationalist image from the 1930s. Grounding Desh Chintan against a matrix of archival sources, banned literature, oral history interviews and other posters of the era presents a substantially different picture of the way in which the anti-colonial movement was conceived in the 1930s. This analysis suggests that there was a moment in the freedom struggle in which support for acts of retributive revolutionary violence were unproblematically maintained alongside genuine enthusiasm for the Gandhian program of non-violence

Aesthetics · Art · Colonialism · Enthusiasm · Nationalism · Nationalist Movement · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Gender Studies · History · Indian History and Philosophy · Law · Psychology · Social Psychology · South Asian Studies and Conflicts · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies