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This book is correctly regarded as one of Trotsky’s finest classics. It is a product of a sharp polemic within the American trotskyist movement during the period 1939-40. This was a dispute which touched on the very fundamentals of Marxism. It was for this reason that Trotsky himself participated in this struggle in the form of a series of articles and letters that are brought together in this volume.
Publisher : Aakar Publications
Stretcher-Bearer of Empire
In the pantheon of global liberation heroes, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi has pride of place. Leaders like Mandela have lauded him as being part of the epic battle to defeat the white regime and prepare the way for a non-racial country. A popular sentiment in South Africa goes: ‘India gave us Mohandas, and we returned him to you as Mahatma’.
Against this background, The South African Gandhi: Stretcher-Bearer of Empire unravels the complex story of a man who, throughout his stay on African soil (1893–1914), remained true to Empire while expressing disdain for Africans. For Gandhi, whites and Indians were bound by an Aryan bloodline that had no place for the African. His racism was matched by his class (and caste) prejudice towards the Indian indentured. He persistently claimed that they were ignorant and needed his leadership, and wrote their struggles out of history—struggles this book documents.
The authors show that Gandhi never missed an opportunity to demonstrate his loyalty to Empire, with a particular penchant for war. He served as stretcher-bearer in the war between Brit and Boer, demanded that Indians be allowed to carry fire-arms, and recruited volunteers for the imperial army in both England and India during the First World War.
Ashwin Desai is Professor of Sociology at the University of Johannesburg. His previous books include South Africa: Still Revolting, ‘We are the Poors’: Community Struggles in Post-Apartheid South Africa and Reading Revolution: Shakespeare on Robben Island among others.
Goolam Vahed is Associate Professor of History at the University of KwaZulu Natal. He writes on histories of migration, ethnicity, religion, and identity formation among Indian South Africans.
This book made history. It wasn’t banned, not quite, when it first appeared in 1984, but its disappearance was cleverly managed so that few got to read the only authentic account of how a protected kingdom became India’s twenty-second state. As the Hon. David Astor, editor of The Observer in London, wrote, Sunanda K. Datta-Ray was ‘alone in witnessing and communicating the essential story’. He had to surmount many obstacles and incur severe disapproval to do so. Nearly thirty years later, a revised edition with the author’s long new introduction reads like an exciting thriller. Rich with dances and durbars, lamaist rituals, intrigue and espionage, it brings vividly to life the dramatis personae of this Himalayan drama—Sikkim’s sad last king, Chogyal Palden Thondup Namgyal, and his vivacious American queen, Hope Cooke; bumbling Kazi Lendhup Dorji and his scheming Kazini, whose nationality and even her name were shrouded in mystery, and who played into the hands of more powerful strategists. Citing documents that have not been seen by any other writer, the book analyses law and politics with masterly skill to recreate the Sikkim saga against the background of a twentieth-century Great Game involving India and China. Smash and Grab: Annexation of Sikkim didn’t only make history. It is history.
The Motorcycle Diaries is a story which revolves around 2 men who embark on a road journey on a 1939 Norton 500cc cylinder motorcycle from Buenos Aires. They are out to discover and explore South America. This book had been written 8 years prior to the Cuban Revolution. The person who wrote the memoirs of this journey was one of those 2 bikers, Ernesto Guevara. He focused on the injustices that were prevalent at that time in South America.
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