Event Metaphor, Memory Chauri Chaura 1922-1992

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On 4 February 1922, peasant volunteers who had enlisted in Gandhi's newly launched people's struggle against British Rule turned violent and burned down a police station in Chauri Chaura killing twenty three policemen. According to Shahid Amin, this dramatic occurrence simply had to be quickly forgotten as a stain upon the clean sheets of Gandhian non-violence. And so it was. Chaur Chaura was effectively blotted out of the ground narrative of Indian heroic nationalism, making a token appearance in authoritative text books. In Contrast with this, in Event, Metaphor Memory Amin reveals the fascinating specificities that comprise the history of Chauri Chaura. By combining archival records with local memory to amplify voices of individual peasants, he analyses the way events and memories are given meanings and emphases, and how records are appropriated by different, sometimes conflicting, histories. The result is a book that breaks new ground in several areas of Indian historiography.

About the Author

Shahid Amin is a professor of history at Delhi University. He has been a visiting fellow at Stanford, Princeton and Berlin. He has authored Sugarcane and Sugar in Gorakhpur as well as several seminal essays in subltern Studies.