What Went Wrong With

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While refuting contemporary fashionable discourse on ‘History from Below’, which is based on cultural determinism, the author of the present volume urges scholars to use their own innate creativity (as human agency) collectively to build an alternative theoretical framework that can open up the possibility of creating an alternative state of being and alternative kinds of societies. While suggesting one of many possible alternatives, the author has attempted to reinstate in the present volume the notion of ‘human agency’ as human being’s innate capacity for creativity, which is closely related to the concept of ‘humaneness’. Author believes that such interpretation will open up the possibility of developing a new theoretical framework that will be devoid of binaries such as, traditional/modern, core/periphery, progressive/backward, national/global. Based on these ideas, the present volume is an attempt to show one of may possibilities of writing a history of the world from an alternative perspective derived from the experiences of the social formations, cultural formations and class struggles in India. The focus on “India” is important (not merely as a local history, or colonial history) because it represents the historical experiences of one billion plus people with all possible historical, political, economic, and cultural scenarios and its interactions with many other societies over time. Author hopes that suggestions hypothesized in this volume might help in writing histories-everywhere-of women, working people, oppressed people, oppressed societies, as well as of oppressive societies from the vantage point of their own societies and their interactions with other societies without using binary terms. Such history writing will allow oppressed people and oppressed societies to break away from the prevailing notion of ‘inevitable fate’ about their present miserable condition and hopeless future choices, as they are made to believe about the inevitability of ‘globalization’, about the so called ‘development’, and their consequences.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Vinay Bahl

Vinay Bahl is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the Pennsylvania College of Technology, USa. After receiving her M.Phil. in Modern Indian History from Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi, she completed her Ph.D. in sociology from Binghamton University, New York, in 1991. Her first book The Making of the Indian Working Class: A Case Study of Tata Iron and Steel Co. 1880-1946, was published in 1995 and she co-editied a volume on History After the Three Worlds: Post-Eurocentric Historiographies in 2000. At present she is engaged in an ongoing project "Rethinking Underdevelopment" A Comparative Study of the Large Scale Steel Industry in Imperial Russia, colonial India, Britain and the USa at the turn of the Nineteenth Century". She has published numerous articles in variuos scholarly journals in India as well as abroad on issues ranging from industrialisation, working calss, caste, women, culture, music and clothing. She was in invited guest scholar of the College de France, in Paris for the academic year of 2002-2003. She was also an Associate Fellow at the International Institute for Asian Studies in Amsterdam during the Fall of 2004.

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Bibliographic information

Title
What Went Wrong With
Author
Edition
1st ed.
Publisher
ISBN
8170742706
Length
xii+348p., Notes; Bibliography; Index; 22cm.
Subjects