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Decolonization in South Asia

  • Living reference work entry
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The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism

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Synonyms

Independence; National movement; Partition; Transfer of power; Third World

Definition/Description

Scholars have defined the term “decolonization” in a number of ways, imparting the word with various meanings and understandings. On one hand, they have used this word to describe the political process of transition from “colonial dependency to sovereignty” (Strang 1991: 429), while, on the other, it has been described as the “transference of legal sovereignty,... [as well as] a movement for moral justice and political solidarity against imperialism” (Duara 2004: 2). Some have offered more radical definitions like “rejection of the civilization of the white man” (Delavignette, cited in Betts 2012: 23) or “...the replacing of a certain ‘species’ of men by another ‘species’ of men....there is a total, complete, and absolute substitution....a whole social structure being changed from bottom up” (Fanon 1963: 33). M.K. Gandhi also had a radical vision in mind when he wrote in the...

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of History, Institute of Development Studies Kolkata (IDSK), Kolkata, West Bengal, India

    Anwesha Sengupta

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  1. Anwesha Sengupta
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Correspondence to Anwesha Sengupta .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Graduate Center for Worker Education, Brooklyn College, New York, NY, USA

    Immanuel Ness

  2. Independent Scholar, Belfast, UK

    Zak Cope

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Sengupta, A. (2019). Decolonization in South Asia. In: Ness, I., Cope, Z. (eds) The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91206-6_127-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91206-6_127-1

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  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-91206-6

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