Böcker av Judith M. Brown

Dr Brown presents a political study of the first clearly defined period in Mahatma Gandhi's Indian career, from 1915 to 1922.

By the end of the twentieth century some nine million people of South Asian descent had left India, Bangladesh or Pakistan and settled in different parts of the world, forming a diverse and significant modern diaspora. In the early nineteenth century, many left reluctantly to seek economic opportunities which were lacking at home. This is the story of their often painful experiences in the diaspora, how they constructed new social communities overseas and how they maintained connections with the countries and the families they had left behind. It is a story compellingly told by one of the premier historians of modern South Asia, Judith Brown, whose particular knowledge of the diaspora in Britain and South Africa gives her insight as a commentator. This is a book which will have a broad appeal to general readers as well as to students of South Asian and colonial history, migration studies and sociology.

Judith Brown explores Nehru as a figure of power and provides an assessment of his leadership at the head of a newly independent India with no tradition of democratic politics.

Drawing on sources only recently made available, the author sketches a portrait of Gandhi within the context of his time in which the Indian leader emerges as neither a plaster saint nor a wily politician, but as a complex man whose actions followed honourably from his convictions.

Result of a conference held in 1993, a century after Gandhi was ejected from a train at Pietermaritzburg station, this book traces some of the influences, which effected his transformation from an unsuccessful young man to a mature political and spiritual leader ready to carve his niche in history after his return to India in 1914.

This book is an analysis, based on new material, of the phase between 1928 and 1934 when Gandhi was leader of a continental campaign of civil disobedience against the raj. During this time Gandhi emerged from the comparative political quiescence which had followed his initial rise to prominence in 1920 as architect of a campaign of non-cooperation with the Raj.