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Leonard A. Gordon

historian of South Asia

Correspondence, annotated notebooks and portrait silhouettes prepared for research
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Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionJun 23, 2026
Entity authorityQ16731395 ↗
Source-derived summary

Leonard Abraham Gordon is a historian of South Asia, especially of Bengal, whose 1990 book Brothers Against the Raj: A Biography of Indian Nationalist Leaders Sarat and Subhas Chandra Bose is considered the definitive biography of Subhas Chandra Bose.

Education and career

Gordon graduated from Amherst College, and received his Ph.D. from Harvard University. He was a professor of history at Brooklyn College, City University of New York, and has emeritus status there now. He was also the director of the Southern Asia Institute at Columbia University.

Gordon's revised Harvard dissertation, Bengal: the Nationalist Movement won the (now discontinued) biennial Watumull Prize of the American Historical Association in 1974, a prize recognizing "the best book on the history of India originally published in the United States." Gordon has been praised for his "narration of political events."

Bibliography

Gordon, Leonard A.; Miller, Barbara Stoler (1971), A Syllabus of Indian Civilization, New York: Columbia University Press

Gordon, Leonard A. (January 1974), Bengal: the Nationalist Movement, 1876–1940, New York: Columbia University Press, ISBN 978-0-231-03753-2

Gordon, Leonard A. (1990), Brothers Against the Raj: A Biography of Indian Nationalist Leaders Sarat and Subhas Chandra Bose, New York: Columbia University Press, ISBN 978-0-231-07383-7

See also

Joyce Lebra

Peter W. Fay

Death of Subhas Chandra Bose

Notes

References

Framke, Maria (2012), "Encounters with Fascism and National Socialist in non-European Regions: Review of five books 1. Sugata Bose, His Majesty's Opponent: Subhas Chandra Bose and India's Struggle Against Empire, 2011; 2. ..." (PDF), Sudasien-Chronik – South Asia Chronicle, vol. 2, Sudasien-Seminar der Humboldt-Universitat zu Berlin, pp. 350–374, doi:10.18452/17972, ISBN 978-3-86004-286-1

Gupta, Brijen K. (1975), "Review of Bengal: The Nationalist Movement, 1876-1940 by Leonard A Gordon", American Historical Review, 30 (4): 1033, doi:10.2307/1867585, JSTOR 1867585

Hayes, Romain (2011), Subhas Chandra Bose in Nazi Germany: Politics, Intelligence and Propaganda 1941-1943, Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0-19-932739-3

Kling, Blair B. (1993), "Review of :Brothers against the Raj: A Biography of Indian Nationalists Sarat and Subhas Chandra Bose by Leonard A. Gordon", Journal of the American Oriental Society, 113 (1): 155, doi:10.2307/604239, JSTOR 604239

Kopf, David (1992), "Review of: Brothers against the Raj: A Biography of Indian Nationalists Sarat and Subhas Chandra Bose by Leonard A. Gordon", American Historical Review, 97 (1): 270–271, doi:10.2307/2164695, JSTOR 2164695

Wainwright, A. Martin (Summer 2013), "Review of His Majesty's Opponent: Subhas Chandra Bose and India's Struggle against Empire, by Sugata Bose, 2011", Historian, 75 (2): 361–362, doi:10.1111/hisn.12010_25, S2CID 144712375

Zachariah, Benjamin (2012), "Review of Sugata Bose.

Editorial summary

The public source identifies “Leonard A. Gordon” as historian of South Asia. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Leonard, Gordon and historian.

Editorial reviewStrongest as a route into the people, institutions and dated events that shaped the subject’s public record. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1990, 1974, 1971, 1876—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. Its value is orientation rather than verdict, with Leonard, Gordon and historian providing the first useful test.
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A short description can identify a subject without explaining its stakes. For “Leonard A. Gordon”, the useful work is to connect “historian of South Asia” to the records capable of establishing context and consequence.

Evidence profile

The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 23, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q16731395. VIAF identifies the subject as 64050835. The Library of Congress control number is n88682485. None of the 2 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1990, 1974, 1971 and 1876.

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This entry incorporates text from “Leonard A. Gordon” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.