SUHELDEV 2020 EDITION FREE BOOK PDF
SUHELDEV THE KING WHO SAVED INDIA BY AMISH TRIPATHI
SUHELDEV THE KING WHO SAVED INDIA BOOK DSCRIPTION:-
Legend of Suheldev: King Who Saved India is the eighth book by Amish Tripathi, and the first book from The Immortal Writers’ Centre. It was released on 20 June 2020 and is published by Westland Publications. It is based on the legendary Indian king Suheldev who defeated the army of Salar Maqsud in the Battle of Bahraich in 1034 CE.
The story begins in 1025 CE when Mahmud of Ghazni sacks Somnath Temple and breaks the idol of Lord Shiva. The prince of Shravasti, Malladev, dies trying to save the temple. When his brother Suheldev comes to know of this, he feels enraged and promises retaliation.
Together with his father King Mangaldhwaj, Suheldev goes to Kannauj to ask for King Ajitpal’s help in countering Mahmud’s further attacks. But instead, they are insulted and sent back. On their way back, they notice a Turkish camp and engage in a fight with them.
They kill all of them and realize that the Turks can be beaten if taken by surprise. So, Suheldev decides to exile himself and attack the Turks by surprise while pretending to have rebelled against King Mangaldhwaj so that Mahmud doesn’t attack Shravasti.
Years pass and by 1029, Suheldev becomes famous as the bandit prince and a thorn in the side of the Turks. During this time, he also loots Qasar Khan, a special envoy of Mahmud and the governor of Kannauj but treats his wife with respect and is kind to his six year old. After looting them, he lets them go. He also visits Bareilly and meets a Turk called Aslan who is a disciple of the Sufi saint Nuruddin Shaikh.
Once a maulvi, Zayan, gets into a conflict with Nuruddin calling him a supporter of kafirs and Zayan’s nephew attacks Nuruddin. In order to save Nuruddin, Aslan attacks Zayan’s nephew, killing him in the process. Due to this, Nuruddin casts Aslan away as he hates bloodshed. Suheldev who was watching this befriends Aslan and invites him to join his team to which he agrees. He sometimes goes to spy on Turk soldiers for Suheldev as he himself is a Turk and understands Turkish.
In 1030, the Turks attack Delhi. The king of Delhi, Mahipal Tomar, is killed in the battle and the Turks win. After winning, the Turks kill all the soldiers and men in Delhi, not even sparing babies. Women are sold in slave markets.
Everyone who was related to the king is killed so that there can be no claim to the throne except for two people — Jaichand, Mahipal’s son-in-law and the ruler of Sirat who wasn’t present in Delhi and the king’s commander-in-chief Govardhan, whose father was the king’s fifth cousin. Govardhan is saved because he retreats in time with a band of 30 soldiers.
Govardhan decides to go to Sirat for Jaichand’s help but on the way, a woman tells him that Jaichand is a supporter of the Turks and he would hand him over to them and that was the reason why he didn’t help Mahipal in the battle.
The woman is later revealed to be Suheldev’s spy and tells him the whereabouts of Suheldev and Govardhan joins his team.
Suheldev and his team go to villages attacked by the Turks. On one such visit, he goes to a village of leather workers which is destroyed by the Turks and all the people killed except a woman called Toshani who was saved because she was away when the Turks attacked. Toshani used to be a soldier in Kannauj army but deserted it when Kannauj surrendered to Mahmud of Ghazni. Toshani joins Suheldev’s team. Suheldev later falls in love with Toshani.
In one of his attack on Turks, Suheldev is gravely injured and nearly succumbs to his wounds, but Aslan saves him. But, it turns out that Aslan was actually Mahmud’s nephew, Salar Maqsud, in disguise and he only helped and saved Suheldev to kill him at the right place and at the right time so that he may be made into a good example. It also turns out that he went to meet Karim in his spy mission, who was the head of Turkish invasion of India. It is also revealed that Karim was Maqsud’s lover.
In the meantime, Mahmud dies of unknown reason and a civil war breaks out among his sons. As a result, all the Turk armies are called back and so is Maqsud as he was Mahmud’s strongest commander in chief. Maqsud, as Aslan, tells the news of Mahmud’s death to Suheldev saying Turks are not going to attack India for some years as they are into a civil war. He further tells him that he is not required in the mission for sometime as the Turks are gone and he is going to find some new Sufi master for himself. Thus, he leaves Suheldev and sets back to Ghazni in order to help Mahmud’s rightful heir get the throne. In the meantime, Mangaldhwaj succumbs to cancer and Suheldev returns to his kingdom and ascends the throne. Before his death, Mangaldhwaj says that he had created a confederacy of 21 kings to repel any Turkic invasion and Suheldev leads it.
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COMRADES AGAINST IMPERIALISM NEHRU, INDIA AND INTERWAR INTERNATIONALISM 2020 EDITION FREE PDF BOOK
DESCRIPTION OF THIS BOOK:-
In this book Michele L. Louro compiles the debates, introduces the personalities, and reveals the ideas that seeded Jawaharlal Nehru’s political vision for India and the wider world. Set between the world wars, this book argues that Nehru’s politics reached beyond India in order to fulfill a greater vision of internationalism that was rooted in his experiences with anti-imperialist and anti-fascist mobilizations in the 1920s and 1930s.
Using archival sources from India, the United States, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Germany, and Russia, the author offers a compelling study of Nehru’s internationalism as well as contributes a necessary interwar history of institutions and networks that were confronting imperialist, capitalist, and fascist hegemony in the twentieth-century world.
Louro provides readers with a global intellectual history of anti-imperialism and Nehru’s appropriation of it, while also establishing a history of a typically overlooked period.
Michele Louro provides a revealing portrait of Nehru and of his two political souls. On one hand, there is ‘Nehru the comrade’, cosmopolitan and charismatic member of a militant network extending from Europe to Asia, Africa, and the Americas.
On the other, ‘Nehru the nationalist’ – a role far better known and widely celebrated – freedom fighter and to-be-father of the nation, leader of the Indian National Congress (INC) and at the forefront India’s struggle for decolonization.
Most literature mainly understands Nehru as a nationalist, hence portrays his commitment to internationalism as secondary or instrumental to the achievement of the nationalist objective of independence.
Taking distance from such interpretations, Louro makes room for Nehru’s often neglected avatar of comrade. She argues that Nehru’s faith in anti-imperialism was not ancillary to other goals but authentic, a political ideal adopted in its own right.
The author maintains that in Nehru’s political system there was, in principle, neither hierarchy nor contradiction between internationalist anti-imperialism and nationalist anti-colonialism. For him ‘nationalism was often framed as a “stage” to internationalism’ (p. 12).
Once socialized into the ideals of anti-imperialism and socialism at the Brussels Congress, Nehru envisioned of a world in which the anti-capitalist and the anti-colonial struggles went hand in hand, necessary as they were to each other.
Their respective goals were eventually convergent: to have a world free from exploitation, whether perpetrated to the detriment of working classes or non-European nations. Nehru tried to keep these two ideals together and to juggle his double role of LAI militant and INC member throughout the interwar period.
Comrade-congressman Nehru emerges from Louro’s account as an extremely able politician, a ‘transformist’ at times. In India, he strives to ‘internationalize Indian nationalism’ (p. 183). He pushes the Congress to join hands with the LAI contending that anti-imperialists support India’s cause for independence. He attempts to introduce socialism into the INC program, managing at the same time a difficult relationship with more moderate Gandhian congressmen (Ch. 3).
On the other hand, in Europe he advocates for LAI’s support to India’s nationalist cause positioning ‘India at the forefront of the world struggle against imperialism’ (p. 39). Later on, once the war threat becomes reality and the world spirals into World War II, he maintains that ‘peace can come only when India is free’ (p. 233).
Overall Louro delineates Nehru as a comrade sincerely committed to internationalist ideals, even when these eventually come into conflict with the priority objective of Indian independence (pp. 241, 254). The contradictions of Nehru’s ‘anti-imperialism with Indian characteristics’, emerge as fascism materializes in Europe (Ch. 6). The historical events of the period make it difficult for Nehru to juggle his two avatars as he used to. At the same time, they produce an ideological extremization that poisons the inclusive partnerships on which the LAI had been funded – the ‘blend’ of anti-imperialism, anti-colonialism, and socialism Nehru had advocated for – eventually bringing the organization to its end (Ch. 7).
Louro suggests that Nehru’s commitment to internationalism remained incorrupt throughout these events and that he always acted in good faith. Rather than pure idealism, a more cynical diagnosis would read in these contradictions evidence of pragmatism, realism, perhaps even hypocrisy at times. Similarly, some deficiencies of Nehru’s internationalism, such as the Indo-centrism of his world view (pp. 55-7, 242, 254) or his approximated understanding of communist China – merely based on the interactions with the Kuomintang (pp. 242, 247, 254, 280) – could invite stronger criticism.
In any case, the book deserves commendation for providing a more nuanced and sophisticated picture of the politician Nehru, his political vision and his understanding of the world. Also, it shows in detail how these were influenced not only by Indian events, but by what was happening in the rest of the globe as well. Another important contribution of the book is that it sheds light on a historical period on which relatively less little literature is available. Louro’s arguments are based on a careful reconstruction of Nehru’s correspondences and travels. Moreover, her conclusions often expand or challenge mainstream notions.
She demonstrates, for example, that Nehru’s commitment to socialism begun not during his education in England (1905-1912), but at the Brussels Congress (1927) and through his consequent militancy within the LAI (Ch. 1, 2). Against historical accounts which argue that anti-imperialism pushed Nehru to ‘abandon authentically indigenous ideas about India’, Louro maintains that ‘Nehru’s anti-colonial and anti-imperial projects were not mutually exclusive and cannot be understood without examining the national and the international dimension together’ (p. 104).
To support this thesis, Louro considers the INC–LAI breakup of 1930 and its aftermath. Such crisis is widely seen as the end of LAI’s constraining over Nehru, which lets him finally free to embrace his nationalist mission fully. In fact, the author demonstrates that after the breakup Nehru’s anti-imperialist militancy did not stop but continued, and that he kept cultivating crucial relationships with former comrades (pp.182-3).
Another compelling part of the book is Louro’s take on Nehru’s socialism, a widely debated element of his political thought. She argues that his ’”vague and confused” sympathies or “partial commitment” to socialism and communism’ are better understood ‘by thinking about his commitment to anti-imperialism’. She therefore proposes a rereading of Nehru’s Glimpses of World History (1934) as an anti-imperialist text (pp. 184-8), which brings her to reject the idea that ‘Nehru’s world history depends on the enlightenment notions of progress based upon a Eurocentric version of history’ (p. 185).
Throughout the exposition, the author engages in dialogue with the related literature, explaining how the book aims at presenting interpretations often alternative to it. Her knowledgeable use of primary sources and clear prose further add to the value of the book.
Comrades Against Imperialism will appeal to readers across disciplines. It will be most useful to historians focusing on the interwar years and on internationalist organizations flourished in the period. Those looking at the history of imperialism, the British Raj, decolonization, and the participation of colonies to internationalist movements will find it equally enriching. The book’s central message to historians is to return the global context its relevance while writing national histories. With regard to Asia and India specifically, it ‘asks critically how this earlier history of anti-imperialist solidarity shaped and impacted Nehru’s views of India and the third world’ (p. 15). Hence, it is an essential reading for understanding the conditions and connections within which the struggle for independence took place and Nehru shaped his Weltanschauung.
Because Nehru’s imprint characterized India’s international stance as a sovereign state throughout and beyond the Nehruvian era, Louro’s study of Nehru’s internationalism is extremely relevant also to those concerned with India’s contemporary foreign policy. The book’s insights, often challenging dominant interpretations, offer useful inputs to rethink some crucial events of Asian history and India’s performance in those occasions. These are, for example, the Bandung conference (1955) –reassessed by Louro in Chapter 7 – as well as the 1962 India–China war. These are watershed moments whose long-term effects have not ceased to influence contemporary international affairs; yet no final conclusion has been reached about their interpretation and scholars keep investigating them to produce new knowledge. Comrades Against Imperialism finds a place also within this literature, as it adds to the debate on how Nehruvian India used to see the world and consequently engaged it. Therefore, it is a must read also for those concerned with producing historically-informed analyses of its foreign policy.
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