Identities in South Asia: Conflicts and Assertions

This book examines how identities are formed and expressed in political, social and cultural contexts across South Asia. It is a comprehensive intervention on how, why and what identities have come to be, and takes a closer look at the complexities of their interactions.

Drawing on an interdisciplinary approach, combining methodologies from history, literary studies, politics, and sociology, this book:

• Explores the multiple ways in which personal and collective identities manifest and engage, are challenged and resisted across time and space.;

• Highlights how the shared history of colonialism and partition, communal violence, bloodshed and pogrom are instrumental in understanding present-day developments in identity politics.;

• Sheds light on a number of current themes such as borders and nations, race and ethnicity, identity politics and fundamentalism, language and regionalism, memory and community, and resistance and assertion.

A key volume in South Asian Studies, this book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of modern South Asian history, politics, sociology, literary studies and social exclusion.

Vivek Sachdeva is a Professor of English at the University School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha University, New Delhi, India. He has worked on adaptations of novels into films from the narratological perspective from Panjab University, Chandigarh. His book, Fiction to Film: Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s The Householder and Heat and Dust has been released in 2017. Presently, he is doing a book on Shyam Benegal’s cinema engaging with the questions of India as a nation in postcolonial times. He is also a translator and has translated two books of Hindi poetry into English. Currently, he is translating Punjabi poetry.

Queeny Pradhan is a Professor of History at the University School of Law and Legal Studies, Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha University, New Delhi, India. She teaches Indian History, Legal History, and Women in History. She did her doctoral research from Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. She was a doctoral research scholar in Modern Indian History, Nehru Memorial Fund, Teen Murti and a postdoctoral fellow at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla. Her book Empire in the Hills: Simla, Darjeeling, Ootacamund and Mount Abu, 1820-1920 was released in 2017. She was the ICCR Chair of Modern Indian History at the University of Vienna, Austria in 2018.

Anu Venugopalan is a Professor of Physics at the University School of Basic and Applied Sciences, Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha University, New Delhi, India. She did her doctoral research at the School of Physical Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi and has been a postdoctoral fellow at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai and the Physical Research Laboratory, Ahmedabad. Her primary area of work includes the foundations of quantum mechanics, the quantum-classical connection, decoherence, confined quantum systems and quantum information