Between the Crown & Congress: Rethinking the Politics of Late Colonial India

Speaker: Dr. Anil Seal, Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, Co-Founder, Cambridge School of Indian History

Chair: Shri K.N. Shrivastava, Director, IIC

Dr. Seal’s talk will trace the genealogy of the structure of Indian politics in the late Colonial period. He argues that the major contradiction in the British Raj lay between the administrative expedience in a fragmented empire and the lucrative nature of a centralized state with a greater extractive capacity. He maintains that while the nationalist movements across India were initially mired in more local networks, they latched on these centripetal forces, aiming at inheriting this structure, and will analyse the transfer of power in the light of this broader picture

(Collaboration: Caucus – The Discussion Forum of Hindu College)