The Institute of Language Studies and Research (ILSR) has been pursuing the highest standards in academic research and its scholarly outreach with global academics of repute has helped in enhancing its research output and academic collaboration. ILSR is a nodal center for advanced research and since its beginning it has tried to contribute in forging a robust academic and intellectual milieu which is conducive to our scholarly growth. Keeping that in mind, it is heartening to see that ILSR organized its prestigious 2023 Hara Prasad Shastri Memorial Lecture and in 2023 this prestigious lecture was delivered by Professor Neilesh Bose, Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair, History of the University of Victoria, Canada.
Professor Neilesh Bose is a renowned South Asian Scholar and his erudition in South Asian intellectual history research has been widely acclaimed. His Hara Prasad Shastri lecture, 2023 on "Taraknath Das in World History" engages with unexplored areas of global intellectual history and internationalism. I am really happy to note that ILSR is publishing this very important lecture draft as part of its institutional publication drive. All these research documents will contribute in a significant way in the larger academic and intellectual deliberations in this field. I thank Professor Bose and the ILSR fraternity for this laudable initiative and I sincerely hope that in the days to come we will witness more scholarly endeavours and global dialogues on Bengali intellectual and cultural history.
Professor Bose has so far conducted his research at the intersection of historical and cultural studies and his seminal works cover a wide array of research areas which is highly inspiring. His scholarly and influential books like India after World History: Literature, Comparison, and Approaches to Globalization (Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2022), South Asian Migrations in Global History: Labor, Law, and Wayward Lives (London: Bloomsbury, 2020), Culture and Power in South Asian Islam: Defying the Perpetual Exception (London: Routledge, 2015), Recasting the Region: Language, Culture, and Islam in Colonial Bengal (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2014), Beyond Bollywood and Broadway: Plays from the South Asian Diaspora (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2009), Maanusher Adhikare (Of Human Rights) (co-translated and co-edited with Sudipto Chatterjee) (Kolkata: Seagull Press, 2009) testify to his superb range and command over different fields of South Asian cultural history. Professor Bose is known for his exemplary scholarship on the British Empire, decolonization, and the history of migrations, etc. Furthermore, he also holds interests in theatre, performance studies, and popular culture.
The turn towards the history of ideas in modern South Asian history over the past decade or thereabouts has led to the rethinking of many seminal debates in the field, especially on the making of politics, nationalism, and modernity. The impact of postcolonial studies, transnational studies, world history, and global studies has also influenced the theoretical and epistemological shifts within this emergent historiography. As a consequence, these studies have generally moved beyond the territorial boundaries of an imagined national community to consider the transnational, international and global contexts, connections, contact zones and networks of thought and activity, and influences on the circulation and reception of political ideas in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The result has been the emergence of a burgeoning literature to create a 'new' intellectual history of South Asia, marking a paradigmatic shift in studying the history of ideas during the height of anti-colonial struggles in the years 1890-1950.
In seeking to rethink the significance of the global circulation of ideas for the study of modern South Asia, this has also offered a critically important corrective, because for far too long have historians understood the movement of ideas as a 'bilateral exchange' between Britain and India, without considering the networks, connections, circulations, and zones of interaction that moved beyond a specific type of core-periphery axis or colonial duality. But as shown by the life and work of several Indian intellectuals and activists involved in anti-colonial struggles and other movements against discrimination and iniquities in the early decades of the twentieth century, they engaged with ideas that were grounded in a bedrock of an expansive intellectual ferment that encompassed issues like racism, capitalism, empire, world power, civil rights, and democracy, among others.
Within the ambit of this turn in the field, this small monograph by Neilesh Bose serves an important purpose of placing Taraknath Das, one of modern India's most important itinerant nationalists and anti-colonial activists who spent considerable time in the United States through educational and activist networks in a broad framework of world history. For all his contribution to some of the most pressing scholarly and political questions of his time, Das who brought into being the foundation names after him that supported research by Indian students for nearly nine decades - has not received due attention in either North American or South Asian histories. Given his educational training in the USA, and his key role in the Ghadar movement as well as in the inter-war anticolonial movements in North America and European, his work serves, as Bose so cogently shows, 'as a window into entangled histories of race and citizenship between the United States of America and India in the late colonial era. Like several of his compatriots including, among others, MN Roy, Benoy Kumar Sarkar, Dhan Gopal Mukerji, Shyamji Krishnavarma, Bhupendranath Dutt, and Lala Lajpat Rai - Das was a central figure in the history of overseas nationalism in the early to mid-twentieth century. The book offers an examination of Das's checkered relationship with the United States, and of his relationship to citizenship and the overall politics of nationalism - something that has not been done till now.
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