This thesis examines the development of the Leftist movement in British Punjab and the insights it provides into the political spaces it inhabited and the actors it engaged with. Broadly speaking, this is an attempt at uncovering lesser fragments that offer the possibility of complicating our understanding of Punjabi and South Asian History. In doing so, I seek to uncover a socio-political arena which played host to a multiplicity of contested identities, notions of sovereignty, and political objectives. I thus seek to explore this complex and fluid arena through the study of a variety of movements and intellectual strands, all of which can collectively be labelled as the ‘Left.’ I begin by situating the Punjabi Left within the wider global arena and then shift to examining it within the province itself. I then explore the Left’s acrimonious relationship with the Colonial State as well as its tortured engagements with ‘nationalist’ and ‘communitarian’ movements. Taken together, this thesis, aside from enhancing our understanding of the ‘Left’ itself, also contributes to regional studies in general and questions historiographical demarcations and the categories that are normatively employed in standard political histories.

This study is concerned with describing and analyzing the factors that led to the election and subsequent defeat of Salvador Allende. The research information was selected from leading books, periodicals, government documents, archives, and newspapers. The thesis presents the political history of Allende's rise to power, the social structure that made his victory possible, the development of major programs that facilitated his ascension and that made his decision inevitable, and, finally, an analysis of his administration with observations as to why he failed. The importance of the lower class, the middle class, the military, and the United States are presented as factors contributing to Allende's victory and later accelerating Allende's fall from power.