| Summary: | This book examines the global circulation of Marxism seen from one of its most highly charged sites: Calcutta, India. Building on but also revising approaches to global intellectual history, the book presents the circulation through Calcutta as a historically sited problem of mass mediation. Using tools from media studies, the book explores the publics, the technologies and the meanings of Marxism in Calcutta. Demonstrating how the Popular Front was split between the so-called 'people's group' and those whom were called 'intellectuals', the book argues that the people's group generally identified themselves as Marxists and preferred audio-visual media, while the so-called intellectuals privileged academic rigour and print media, usually referring to themselves as Marxians. Thus, the author reveals a polyphony of Marxisms amongst the Popular Front. Tracing Marxism back to the Bengal Renaissance and the Swadeshi and Naxal movements, this book shows how debate around the meaning of 'Marxism' continued throughout the 1970s in Calcutta, and helped to engender the historiographical movement that has come to be known as Subaltern Studies. Prasanta Dhar is a historian of South Asia and has taught at the University of Toronto in Canada.
|
|---|