Lala Lajpat Rai

This book is an important historical account that revisits some of the major historiographical issues pertaining to the emergence of communalism in colonial India and offers important insights into it. It takes up the region of Punjab and the period till the first three decades of the 20th century. Lala Lajpat Rai occupies a central place in the narrative and, predictably enough, the book ends its story with the martyrdom of Rai in 1928. This is so in spite of the fact that the major encounters between nationalism and communalism, a theme very central to the concerns of the book, were to unfold in a particularly decisive manner in the decades of the 1930s and 1940s. Given the importance of this theme for our times, the formulations offered by the book are important and carry a significance well beyond the times and spaces discussed in the book.

Historiography of Communalism