In her new book, Anwesha Roy traces an emotional and revolutionary history of the Second World War, through the prism of the Quit India Movement in Bengal. While this last mass-movement of colonial India echoed at an all-India level, Bengal was exceptional in the 1940s due to its geostrategic position after Japan's entry and Calcutta's industrial base. Rooted in the domestic and international context of War, Anwesha explores three interconnected themes – that the Quit India movement in Bengal was not so much the product of 'war of ideas', but was imagined and sustained by a complex synthesis of both Gandhian and revolutionary ideas of political 'action'; that the violent response by the colonial state in India reveals complex undercurrents of imperial anxieties of a post-war political order where it was fast losing out to the resurgent USA; and the conflict between legal and moral ideas of political responsibility displayed by imperial Britain and Gandhi.
Anwesha Roy is a Lecturer in Modern History at the University of Sheffield. She has published widely on modern Indian history and is the author of Making Peace, Making Riots: Communalism and Communal Violence, Bengal 1940-1947 (Cambridge University Press, 2018). She is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and the Royal Asiatic Society.
Speaker(s): Anwesha Roy (University of Sheffield)
Series: Modern South Asian Studies
Venue: St Antony's College - Pavilion Room - Pavilion Room St Antony's College 62 Woodstock Road Oxford Oxfordshire OX2 6JF United Kingdom
Department: Asian Studies Centre (St Antony's)
Organiser: Janaki Srinivasan
Host: Asian Studies Centre
