Event, Metaphor, Memory: Chauri Chaura, 1922-1992

322 Pages·1995·5.3 MB·English

by  Shahid Amin

Central Gorakhpur

Shahid Amin
For Ranajit Guha
have worked intermittently on this book for the last fourteen years-a long
enough period to accumulate numerous debts, some of them outstanding.
I should like to thank the President and Fellows of Trinity College, Oxford, for
electing me to a junior Research Fellowship (1979-82) and for supporting
research in England and India. Travel grants from the British Academy and the
Indian Council of Historical Research materially aided fieldwork. A short-term
visiting fellowship at the Research School of Pacific Studies, Australian
National University, Canberra, in the summer of 1987 gave me an opportunity to
essay an outline of this work. The actual writing was done during 1990 and 1993
while I was a Fellow successively at the Stanford Humanities Center, Stanford
University; the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies, Princeton
University; and the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. I am much beholden to each
of these remarkable institutions for their most generous support of this project.
My special thanks to Bliss Cornachan and Charlie Junkerman at Stanford;
Natalie Zemon Davis and Kari Hoover at Princeton; and Wolf Lepenies and
Joachim Nettlebeck in Berlin. I am grateful to my home university in Delhi for
granting me leave of absence for three years.
I wish to thank the librarian and archivists at the St Stephen's College Library,
Ratan Tata Library, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, and the National
Archives of India, all in Delhi; the UP State Archives and the Secretariat Library
in Lucknow; the India Office Library and Records, London (and Richard Bingle
and Shabana Mahmud in particular); the Stanford and Princeton University
library sytems; and Frau Bottomley and her colleagues at the Bibliothek at the
Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin.
Heather Joshi, David Page, Dinesh Bhugra, Mr Ved Prakash, Alok Sinha, Rana
and Ataullah Qureshi, Habib Ahmad, Ramchandra Dwivedi, Saad Saidullah and
Professor Ramchandra Tiwari have helped me in various ways in London,
Lucknow, Allahabad and Gorakhpur. My acquaintances and informants in
Chauri Chaura, Chotki Dumri, Gaunar and Mundera have greatly affected the
shape of this work.
Parts of this book were presented to seminars at universities and colleges at the
following places: Stanford, Berkeley, Santa Cruz, Chicago, Ann Arbor,
Charlottsville, Philadelphia and Oberlin in the United States; Toronto and York
in Canada; and at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. I am
also grateful to the participants of the Friday Sociology Colloquium at the
University of Delhi, and in particular to J.P.S. Uberoi, Veena Das, Deepak
Mehta, Savyasachi, Roma Chatterji, and Rita Brara.
Several colleagues and friends helped with their comments on the manuscript as
it took shape during 1990-1. I wish to thank Akhil and Purnima Gupta, Lata
Mani, Julio Ramos, Margo Hendricks, Elizabeth Wood, Daniel Herwitz, Barbara
and Tom Metcalf, Eugene Irschick, T.N. Pandey, Dilip Basu and Paul Kashap for
their suggestions. Peter Brown, Christopher Hill, Natalie Davis, Bernard Cohn,
Arcadio Diaz, David Boon, Gyan Prakash, Webb Keane, Nick Dirks, Pratap
Mehta, John Kelly, Steven Fiereman, Zacharay Lockman, Richard Elphick,
Leonard Blusse, David Ludden, Homi Bhabha, Arjun Appadurai, Prasenjit
Duara, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Upendra Baxi, Ashis Nandy, Lloyd and
Susanne Rudolph, Carol Breckenridge, Una Chau-dhuri and Luisa Passerini
have all very kindly commented on a part or the whole of the manuscript.
My colleagues in the Subaltern Studies team: Partha Chatterjee, David
Hardiman, Gautam Bhadra, David Arnold, Gyan Pandey and Dipesh
Chakrabarty have read successive drafts and offered much constructive advice. I
also wish to thank Ravi Dayal for his valuable editorial comments. My editor at
Oxford University Press has been, once again, remarkably helpful. I have also
benefited from the comments and suggestions of Lynne Withey, Tom Laquer,
and the two anonymous referees of the University of California Press.
And finally a big thank you to Bano and young Adil: