" Lines of the Nation is a beautifully crafted ethnographic history, steeped in personal and railway archives and in the oral accounts of Anglo-Indians who live the racial predicaments of colonial and contemporary India. Laura Bear shows deftly the potencies of a colonial past that emerges in the pedigrees they seek to establish and in the intimate interstices of Anglo-Indians families whose anxieties about national and racial belonging shape the ways they draw on colonial differences as they draw away from them. This is a story of an unruly colonial past that permeates their relationship to the documentary state and to the living archives through which they make their precarious place in the present." -- Ann Laura Stoler, Willy Brandt Distinguished University Professor of Anthropology and Historical Studies, New School for Social Research
Acknowledgments Introduction Part 1 1. The Indian Railways and the Management of the Material and Moral Progress of Nations, 1849-1860 2. An Indian Traveling Public, 1850-1900 3. Governing the Railway Family, 1860-1900 4. Industrial Unrest and the Cultivation of Railway Communities, 1897-1931 5. An Economy of Suffering: The Ethics of Popular Nationalism in Petitions from Railway Workers, 1930-1947 6. Public Genealogies: Anglo-Indian Family Histories and the Railway Archive, 1927-1950 Part 2 7. Uncertain Origins and the Strategies of Love: Portraits of Anglo-Indian Railway Families 8. Traces of the Archive: Documents, Bodies, and Nations in Anglo-Indian Family Histories 9. Railway Morality: Status and Authority in the Postcolonial Railway Bureaucracy 10. Ruins and Ghosts: The Uncanny and the Topography of the Colonial Past in the Railway Colony Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index
Laura Bear is lecturer in anthropology at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She is the author of the novel The Jadu House: Intimate Histories of Anglo-India.
A most worthwhile read. -- Ian J. Kerr American Historical Review This fine piece of scholarship deserves to be read by all those who wish to contribute to the field of historical anthropology. -- Manish K. Thakur Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute Lines of the Nation is a substantial contribution to the study of the railway in South Asian history and society. H-Travel
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