Description: To mark the 75th year of India's birth as a republic, Knowledge/Nation brings together reflections on how the social sciences and allied interdisciplinary fields have evolved in the country, and where we can go from here. It explores how India has figured as an object of knowledge and a site of critical reflection in the last hundred years. The volume presents wide coverage - not only narrating the evolution of history, politics, economics, literature etc. in context of changing democratic debates but also asks difficult questions, such as why religious studies never came centre-stage in the academy even though religion remained salient in public debates, how gender studies, film studies and Dalit studies emerged out of demands from outside the academy and whether environmental studies can be framed by the nation at all, given the planetary-scale of the climate crisis. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.
Brief description: Baidik Bhattacharya is Associate Professor of English at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies. He is the author of the much-acclaimed book Postcolonial Writing in the Era of World Literature: Texts, Territories, Globalizations (2018). His works have appeared in some of the leading journals of our times: Critical Inquiry, New Literary History, Boundary 2, Modern Philology, Interventions, Postcolonial Studies, among others.