Interrogating provincial politics: the Leftist Movement in Punjab, c. 1914-1950

Thesis

This thesis examines the development of the Leftist movement in British Punjab and the insights it provides into the political spaces it inhabited and the actors it engaged with. Broadly speaking, this is an attempt at uncovering lesser fragments that offer the possibility of complicating our understanding of Punjabi and South Asian History. In doing so, I seek to uncover a socio-political arena which played host to a multiplicity of contested identities, notions of sovereignty, and political objectives. I thus seek to explore this complex and fluid arena through the study of a variety of movements and intellectual strands, all of which can collectively be labelled as the ‘Left.’ I begin by situating the Punjabi Left within the wider global arena and then shift to examining it within the province itself. I then explore the Left’s acrimonious relationship with the Colonial State as well as its tortured engagements with ‘nationalist’ and ‘communitarian’ movements. Taken together, this thesis, aside from enhancing our understanding of the ‘Left’ itself, also contributes to regional studies in general and questions historiographical demarcations and the categories that are normatively employed in standard political histories.

Authors: Raza, M

• Publication date: 2011
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: Oxford University, UK
• Language: English
• Keywords: Leftist Movement; Colonial India
• Subjects: International,imperial and global history; History