Talking Back: The Idea of Civilization in the Indian Nationalist Discourse

The British discourse on India's history, for the greater part of the nineteenth century, was by and large a monologue. This volume highlights how around the turn of the century, Indians began to 'talk back' and question the colonial assumptions in imagining and narrating India's past. Focusing on how the idea of civilization formed one of the strong elements of the Indian nationalist discourse, it examines the debates surrounding the civilization discourse and nationhood. While Gandhi, Tagore, or Nehru were the foremost thought-leaders in the representation of Indian civilization in a new way, the author argues that there were many others, mainly academic intellectuals in the areas of sociology, linguistics, intellectual history, and various branches of historiography, who contributed to make 'Indian civilization' a central theme in all forms of Indian studies.