Event, Metaphor, Memory - Chauri Chaura (1922 - 1992)  (English, Paperback, Amin Shahid)

Winner of the Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy Book Prize 1997

An account of the momentous event in modern Indian history which made Mahatma Gandhi suspend the non-cooperation movement

On 4 February 1922, peasant volunteers who had enlisted in Gandhi's newly launched people's struggle against British rule turned violent and burned down a police station in ‘Chauri Chaura' killing twenty-three policemen. According to Shahid Amin, this dramatic occurrence simply had to be quickly forgotten as a stain upon the clean sheets of Gandhian non-violence. And so it was. ‘Chauri Chaura' was effectively blotted out of the grand narrative of Indian heroic nationalism, making a token appearance in ‘authoritative' textbooks.

In contrast with this, in Event, Metaphor, Memory Amin reveals the fascinating specificities that comprise the history of ‘Chauri Chaura'. By combining archival records with local memory to amplify voices of individual peasants, he analyses the way events and memories are given meanings and emphases, and how records are appropriated by different, sometimes conflicting, histories. The result is a book that breaks new ground in several areas of Indian historiography.