Kama Maclean
Kama Maclean is Professor of Modern South Asian History at the South Asia Institute, University of Heidelberg, and a Visiting Professor of UNSW, Sydney. She is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities.
Kama's first book, based on her 2003 dissertation, Pilgrimage and Power: the Kumbh Mela in Allahabad, was published in New York by Oxford University Press in 2008. In 2009, Pilgrimage and Power was awarded an Honorable Mention in the Kentish Anand Coomaraswamy Prize, awarded by the Association of Asian Studies in the US.
In 2009, Kama took up a one year appointment as Professorial Research Fellow at the United Arab Emirates University in Al Ain, where she began to research and write about anticolonial activism in 1930s India. This resulted in a series of articles on violent anticolonialism in interwar India, and a book, A Revolutionary History of Interwar India: Violence, Image, Voice and Text (New York: Oxford University Press/London: Hurst, 2015).
In 2010 Kama received a competitive grant from the Australia India Institute and in 2012 a grant from the Australian Research Council (ARC) to undertake a study of intercolonial relations between Australia and India via Britain in the early twentieth century. This study brings together fields of research including Australian Studies, Indian Studies, Imperial and Transnational history, and was published as British India, White Australia in 2020.
She is now working on a sonic history of anticolonialism.
Address: South Asia Institute
Voßstrasse 2, Building 4130
Heidelberg University
69115 Heidelberg
Germany
Kama's first book, based on her 2003 dissertation, Pilgrimage and Power: the Kumbh Mela in Allahabad, was published in New York by Oxford University Press in 2008. In 2009, Pilgrimage and Power was awarded an Honorable Mention in the Kentish Anand Coomaraswamy Prize, awarded by the Association of Asian Studies in the US.
In 2009, Kama took up a one year appointment as Professorial Research Fellow at the United Arab Emirates University in Al Ain, where she began to research and write about anticolonial activism in 1930s India. This resulted in a series of articles on violent anticolonialism in interwar India, and a book, A Revolutionary History of Interwar India: Violence, Image, Voice and Text (New York: Oxford University Press/London: Hurst, 2015).
In 2010 Kama received a competitive grant from the Australia India Institute and in 2012 a grant from the Australian Research Council (ARC) to undertake a study of intercolonial relations between Australia and India via Britain in the early twentieth century. This study brings together fields of research including Australian Studies, Indian Studies, Imperial and Transnational history, and was published as British India, White Australia in 2020.
She is now working on a sonic history of anticolonialism.
Address: South Asia Institute
Voßstrasse 2, Building 4130
Heidelberg University
69115 Heidelberg
Germany
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Books by Kama Maclean
Kama Maclean contends that the actions of these revolutionaries had a direct impact on Congress politics and tested its policy of non-violence. In doing so she draws on visual culture studies, demonstrating the efficacy of imagery in constructing — as opposed to merely illustrating — historical narratives. Maclean analyses visual evidence alongside recently declassified government files, memoirs and interviews to elaborate on the complex relationships between the Congress and the HSRA, which were far less antagonistic than is frequently imagined.
Emphasising the potential of writing to incite, contain or reorient the present, this edited volume promises to provoke new conversations at the intersection of historiography, politics and literature in South Asia, urging scholars and activists to interrogate their own storytelling practices and the relationship of the contemporary moment to violent and contested pasts.
Papers by Kama Maclean
The recent surge of scholarly writing on seditious material in British India tends to focus on the reception and analysis of the content of proscribed publications. We still have scant knowledge of how revolutionary literature was produced and disseminated, partly because of the necessary secrecy in which this took place. Intelligence reports and revolutionary memoirs alike tend to describe the distribution of revolutionary literature in vague terms, almost invariably using the passive voice – ‘offensive pamphlets appeared’ or were simply ‘found’ in such and such a place – as though they somehow distributed themselves. In this paper, I turn my focus to the ways in which revolutionaries of the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association (HSRA) distributed ‘The Philosophy of the Bomb’ in January 1930. Following the HSRA’s daring attempt on the life of the Viceroy in December 1929, the Government of India’s search for key members and their sympathizers took on a renewed urgency. In an attempt to trace the revolutionaries and to break ‘the steel frame of the violence movement’, the Intelligence Bureau turned its attention to the distribution of this polemical document (a four-page riposte to Gandhi’s critique of revolutionary praxis. Analysis of modes of distribution of material on the verge of proscription, I argue, enables a more textured understanding of the thrust of revolutionary literature and its reception. This paper therefore aims to inject the spirit of insurgency into the archive by explaining the ways in which a key document of the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association (HSRA), ‘The Philosophy of the Bomb’, was disseminated in early 1930. The paper is organized into three sections. The first section provides a background for the political context of ‘The Philosophy of the Bomb’ amid debates about violence and nonviolence in the broader nationalist movement. The second describes the different ways in which the document was disseminated in early 1930, drawing on both revolutionary and intelligence reports. The paper then concludes by considering the alignment between the dissemination and impact of the revolutionary manifesto and the bomb itself.
https://vimeo.com/183805540
If historiography is ordered by a series of thematic and methodological turns, then it is not hard to demonstrate that there has in recent years been a turn towards revolutionary histories of South Asia. Scholars
have begun to transcend the limitations of Gandhian frameworks in search of more dynamic understandings of Indian pasts that factor in the role of violence, subterfuge and conspiracy in South Asian anticolonial struggles. But what happens when new methodologies and narratives begin to destabilise or even invert longstanding historical
readings that have been the basis for generations of academic knowledge of the past? When, and under what political and institutional conditions, are fresh interpretations of history sayable?
Can historical trajectories or interpretations be quickly turned or must they evolve slowly? This paper is a self-reflexive critique of the ways in which radical histories can—or cannot—be written in the post-colonial moment, with reference to the compulsions brought to bear in the
writing of revolutionary history. This article considers these
historiographical issues alongside compelling evidence of the involvement of Jawaharlal and Motilal Nehru in key aspects of the revolutionary actions of the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association.
Kama Maclean contends that the actions of these revolutionaries had a direct impact on Congress politics and tested its policy of non-violence. In doing so she draws on visual culture studies, demonstrating the efficacy of imagery in constructing — as opposed to merely illustrating — historical narratives. Maclean analyses visual evidence alongside recently declassified government files, memoirs and interviews to elaborate on the complex relationships between the Congress and the HSRA, which were far less antagonistic than is frequently imagined.
Emphasising the potential of writing to incite, contain or reorient the present, this edited volume promises to provoke new conversations at the intersection of historiography, politics and literature in South Asia, urging scholars and activists to interrogate their own storytelling practices and the relationship of the contemporary moment to violent and contested pasts.
The recent surge of scholarly writing on seditious material in British India tends to focus on the reception and analysis of the content of proscribed publications. We still have scant knowledge of how revolutionary literature was produced and disseminated, partly because of the necessary secrecy in which this took place. Intelligence reports and revolutionary memoirs alike tend to describe the distribution of revolutionary literature in vague terms, almost invariably using the passive voice – ‘offensive pamphlets appeared’ or were simply ‘found’ in such and such a place – as though they somehow distributed themselves. In this paper, I turn my focus to the ways in which revolutionaries of the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association (HSRA) distributed ‘The Philosophy of the Bomb’ in January 1930. Following the HSRA’s daring attempt on the life of the Viceroy in December 1929, the Government of India’s search for key members and their sympathizers took on a renewed urgency. In an attempt to trace the revolutionaries and to break ‘the steel frame of the violence movement’, the Intelligence Bureau turned its attention to the distribution of this polemical document (a four-page riposte to Gandhi’s critique of revolutionary praxis. Analysis of modes of distribution of material on the verge of proscription, I argue, enables a more textured understanding of the thrust of revolutionary literature and its reception. This paper therefore aims to inject the spirit of insurgency into the archive by explaining the ways in which a key document of the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association (HSRA), ‘The Philosophy of the Bomb’, was disseminated in early 1930. The paper is organized into three sections. The first section provides a background for the political context of ‘The Philosophy of the Bomb’ amid debates about violence and nonviolence in the broader nationalist movement. The second describes the different ways in which the document was disseminated in early 1930, drawing on both revolutionary and intelligence reports. The paper then concludes by considering the alignment between the dissemination and impact of the revolutionary manifesto and the bomb itself.
https://vimeo.com/183805540
If historiography is ordered by a series of thematic and methodological turns, then it is not hard to demonstrate that there has in recent years been a turn towards revolutionary histories of South Asia. Scholars
have begun to transcend the limitations of Gandhian frameworks in search of more dynamic understandings of Indian pasts that factor in the role of violence, subterfuge and conspiracy in South Asian anticolonial struggles. But what happens when new methodologies and narratives begin to destabilise or even invert longstanding historical
readings that have been the basis for generations of academic knowledge of the past? When, and under what political and institutional conditions, are fresh interpretations of history sayable?
Can historical trajectories or interpretations be quickly turned or must they evolve slowly? This paper is a self-reflexive critique of the ways in which radical histories can—or cannot—be written in the post-colonial moment, with reference to the compulsions brought to bear in the
writing of revolutionary history. This article considers these
historiographical issues alongside compelling evidence of the involvement of Jawaharlal and Motilal Nehru in key aspects of the revolutionary actions of the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association.