Asian Voices in a Post-Colonial Age

Susan Bayly is Reader in Historical Anthropology in the Department of Social Anthropology, Cambridge University and a Fellow of Christ's College, Cambridge. Her previous publications include Caste, Society and Politics in India from the Eighteenth Century to the Modern Age (1999) and Saints, Goddesses and Kings: Muslims and Christians in South Indian Society 1700-1900 (1989).

• 1. Introduction; 2. The modern intellectual family. Separation, provision and nurture; 3. Narrating family lives in present-day Hanoi; 4. The pains and perils of intelligentsia life; 5. India as a domain of socialist modernity; 6. Cosmopolitan spaces in revolutionary times; 7. Vistas of modernity in the insurgent countryside; 8. At home and beyond in the new socialist era; 9. Conclusion.

'Asian Voices in a Post-Colonial Age is an engaging and original work of interest to scholars of both South and Southeast Asia. Bayly's comparison of Indian and Hanoi intellectuals is novel and useful. It allows her to underline the active and extremely complex relationship that a liminal generation of Asian intellectuals had to its colonial and post-colonial pasts. It also reminds us of how the language of socialism has shaped the experience and memory of colonialism and post-colonialism, and indeed continues to shape a more or less post-socialist present. Finally, it makes accessible to an English-speaking audience the stories of a group of women and men who will not be with us much longer … Asian Voices in a Post-Colonial Age thus appears at an important moment, reminding us of the achievements of one remarkable generation, and providing perspective on a generation of Hanoi intellectuals to come.' International Journal of Asian Studies