Kama Maclean

Universität Heidelberg · South Asia Institute (SAI)

The recent surge of scholarly writing on seditious material in British India tends to focus on the reception and analysis of the content of proscribed publications. We still have scant knowledge of how revolutionary literature was produced and disseminated, partly because of the necessary secrecy in which this took place. Intelligence reports and r...

The focus of British India, White Australia is on the difficult histories that have marked Australia’s approaches to India through the framework of the empire, and later the commonwealth. Australia’s relationship to Britain and the empire has been variable, but few would disagree that in much of the early twentieth century Australia strained agains...

This paper considers the parallels and disconnections between leftist thought in Australia and India at a key moment in the interwar era, as the Comintern transitioned from its Second to its Third Period, eschewing the united front with nationalist and parliamentary parties. It does this by tracing the movements of the Australian communist Jack Rya...

Kama Maclean's article responds to the analytical threads offered by Partha Chatterjee's “Nationalism, Internationalism, and Cosmopolitanism: Some Observations from Modern Indian History” by focusing closely on the dynamics leading to the passing of the Fundamental Rights resolution by the Indian National Congress at Karachi in 1931. A key moment i...

If historiography is ordered by a series of thematic and methodological turns, then it is not hard to demonstrate that there has in recent years been a turn towards revolutionary histories of South Asia. Scholars have begun to transcend the limitations of Gandhian frameworks in search of more dynamic understandings of Indian pasts that factor in th...

A growing body of academic literature on political violence in British India has begun to correct the presumption that the anti-colonial struggle was predominantly non-violent. Yet such studies tend to overwhelmingly focus on the struggle of revolutionaries—largely defined as activists who coordinated attacks, predominantly assassinations, against...

Recent scholarship on transnational immigration restriction have tended to frame British policies in opposition to those of white settler colonies, emphasising the frustration of British officialdom at the explicitly racist exclusions in South Africa, Canada, New Zealand and Australia. While acknowledging these, this paper interrogates the British...

This book draws on new evidence to deliver a fresh perspective on the ambitions, ideologies and practices of the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association or Army (HSRA), the revolutionary party formed by Chandrashekhar Azad and Bhagat Singh, inspired by transnational anti-imperial dissent. The book offers an account of the activities of the north...

The Hindustan Socialist Republican Association (HSRA) was a peripheral but significant organization that orchestrated violent ‘actions’ aimed at British targets in interwar India. In post-colonial India, as several political interests vie to claim the HSRA’s legacy, there is debate about what the HSRA intended to achieve through violence. In nation...

This essay maps out the discursive and political trajectories of the ‘revolutionary’ in Indian historical and literary worlds. Focusing on the Hindustan Socialist Republican Army and related interwar Indian anticolonial agitators, this essay reflects on the lineages, breadth, and productivity of the term. By tracing the figure of the revolutionary,...

The revolutionary movement in the United Provinces and Punjab, which peaked in activity in the years 1928–1932, is often thought in inherently gendered terms, and as being underpinned by a masculine agenda of retributive anti-colonial violence. This study attempts to peel back the layers of masculinity attributed to the Hindustan Socialist Republic...

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 C...

Narratives about the revolutionary movement have largely been the preserve of the popular domain in India, as Christopher Pinney has recently pointed out. India's best-known revolutionary, Bhagat Singh—who was executed by the British in 1931 for his role in the Lahore Conspiracy Case—has been celebrated more in posters, colourful bazaar histories a...

Bhagat Singh, the revolutionary nationalist executed by the British in 1931, continues to be an enormously popular figure in contemporary India, immediately recognizable in ubiquitous posters, stickers and placards by his distinctive hat. This article uncovers the story behind Bhagat Singh's original ‘hat photograph’ by tracing the portrait's journ...

This book is a historical study of the largest pilgrimage festival in the world, the Kumbh Mela. Focusing on the festival in a key northern Indian political town, Allahabad, the book traces the historical changes in the nature of the mela from the 1700s onward, with particular reference to the influence of British colonialism and the growth of Indi...

This book is a historical study of the largest pilgrimage festival in the world, the Kumbh Mela. Focusing on the festival in a key northern Indian political town, Allahabad, the book traces the historical changes in the nature of the mela from the 1700s onward, with particular reference to the influence of British colonialism and the growth of Indi...

This book is a historical study of the largest pilgrimage festival in the world, the Kumbh Mela. Focusing on the festival in a key northern Indian political town, Allahabad, the book traces the historical changes in the nature of the mela from the 1700s onward, with particular reference to the influence of British colonialism and the growth of Indi...

This book is a historical study of the largest pilgrimage festival in the world, the Kumbh Mela. Focusing on the festival in a key northern Indian political town, Allahabad, the book traces the historical changes in the nature of the mela from the 1700s onward, with particular reference to the influence of British colonialism and the growth of Indi...

This book is a historical study of the largest pilgrimage festival in the world, the Kumbh Mela. Focusing on the festival in a key northern Indian political town, Allahabad, the book traces the historical changes in the nature of the mela from the 1700s onward, with particular reference to the influence of British colonialism and the growth of Indi...

This book is a historical study of the largest pilgrimage festival in the world, the Kumbh Mela. Focusing on the festival in a key northern Indian political town, Allahabad, the book traces the historical changes in the nature of the mela from the 1700s onward, with particular reference to the influence of British colonialism and the growth of Indi...

It is widely believed that the Allahabad Kumbh Mela is an ancient religious festival or that it is “ageless”, that its roots lie obscured in time immemorial. Editorials and articles in the press at mela time (every twelve years) lyrically emphasize the continuity of the pilgrimage throughout India's past, find inspiration in its durability and chan...