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Author : Mrinalini Sinha
Publisher : Duke University Press
Page : 394 pages
File Size : 52,6 Mb
Release : 2006-07-12
Category : History
ISBN : 0822337959
A historical analysis of a book-inspired controversy that in its dimensions rivalled Hernnstein and Murray's "The Bell Curve" and Rushdie's "The Satanic Verses" and brought forth a new political collectivity in India's women.
Author : Mrinalini Sinha
Publisher : Duke University Press
Page : 387 pages
File Size : 48,5 Mb
Release : 2006-07-12
Category : History
ISBN : 9780822387978
Specters of Mother India tells the complex story of one episode that became the tipping point for an important historical transformation. The event at the center of the book is the massive international controversy that followed the 1927 publication of Mother India, an exposé written by the American journalist Katherine Mayo. Mother India provided graphic details of a variety of social ills in India, especially those related to the status of women and to the particular plight of the country’s child wives. According to Mayo, the roots of the social problems she chronicled lay in an irredeemable Hindu culture that rendered India unfit for political self-government. Mother India was reprinted many times in the United States, Great Britain, and India; it was translated into more than a dozen languages; and it was reviewed in virtually every major publication on five continents. Sinha provides a rich historical narrative of the controversy surrounding Mother India, from the book’s publication through the passage in India of the Child Marriage Restraint Act in the closing months of 1929. She traces the unexpected trajectory of the controversy as critics acknowledged many of the book’s facts only to overturn its central premise. Where Mayo located blame for India’s social backwardness within the beliefs and practices of Hinduism, the critics laid it at the feet of the colonial state, which they charged with impeding necessary social reforms. As Sinha shows, the controversy became a catalyst for some far-reaching changes, including a reconfiguration of the relationship between the political and social spheres in colonial India and the coalescence of a collective identity for women.
Author : Sumathi Ramaswamy
Publisher : Duke University Press
Page : 402 pages
File Size : 54,7 Mb
Release : 2010-04-09
Category : History
ISBN : 9780822391531
Making the case for a new kind of visual history, The Goddess and the Nation charts the pictorial life and career of Bharat Mata, “Mother India,” the Indian nation imagined as mother/goddess, embodiment of national territory, and unifying symbol for the country’s diverse communities. Soon after Mother India’s emergence in the late nineteenth century, artists, both famous and amateur, began to picture her in various media, incorporating the map of India into her visual persona. The images they produced enabled patriotic men and women in a heterogeneous population to collectively visualize India, affectively identify with it, and even become willing to surrender their lives for it. Filled with illustrations, including 100 in color, The Goddess and the Nation draws on visual studies, gender studies, and the history of cartography to offer a rigorous analysis of Mother India’s appearance in painting, print, poster art, and pictures from the late nineteenth century to the present. By exploring the mutual entanglement of the scientifically mapped image of India and a (Hindu) mother/goddess, Sumathi Ramaswamy reveals Mother India as a figure who relies on the British colonial mapped image of her dominion to distinguish her from the other goddesses of India, and to guarantee her novel status as embodiment, sign, and symbol of national territory. Providing an exemplary critique of ideologies of gender and the science of cartography, Ramaswamy demonstrates that images do not merely reflect history; they actively make it. In The Goddess and the Nation, she teaches us about pictorial ways of learning the form of the nation, of how to live with it—and ultimately to die for it.
Author : Anupama Rao
Publisher : Univ of California Press
Page : 416 pages
File Size : 55,9 Mb
Release : 2009-10-13
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9780520943377
This innovative work of historical anthropology explores how India's Dalits, or ex-untouchables, transformed themselves from stigmatized subjects into citizens. Anupama Rao's account challenges standard thinking on caste as either a vestige of precolonial society or an artifact of colonial governance. Focusing on western India in the colonial and postcolonial periods, she shines a light on South Asian historiography and on ongoing caste discrimination, to show how persons without rights came to possess them and how Dalit struggles led to the transformation of such terms of colonial liberalism as rights, equality, and personhood. Extending into the present, the ethnographic analyses of The Caste Question reveal the dynamics of an Indian democracy distinguished not by overcoming caste, but by new forms of violence and new means of regulating caste.
Author : Poulomi Saha
Publisher : Columbia University Press
Page : 474 pages
File Size : 48,7 Mb
Release : 2019-04-16
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9780231549646
In today’s world of unequal globalization, Bangladesh has drawn international attention for the spate of factory disasters that have taken the lives of numerous garment workers, mostly young women. The contemporary garment industry—and the labor organizing pushing back—draws on a long history of gendered labor division and exploitation in East Bengal, the historical antecedent of Bangladesh. Yet despite the centrality of women’s labor to anticolonial protest and postcolonial state-building, historiography has struggled with what appears to be its absence from the archive. Poulomi Saha offers an innovative account of women’s political labor in East Bengal over more than a century, one that suggests new ways to think about textiles and the gendered labors of their making. An Empire of Touch argues that women have articulated—in writing, in political action, in stitching—their own desires in their own terms. They produce narratives beyond women’s empowerment and independence as global and national projects; they refuse critical pronouncements of their own subjugation. Saha follows the historical traces of how women have claimed their own labor, contending that their political commitments are captured in the material objects of their manufacture. Her analysis of the production of historical memory through and by the bodies of women spans British colonialism and American empire, anticolonial nationalism to neoliberal globalization, depicting East Bengal between development economics and postcolonial studies. Through a material account of text and textile, An Empire of Touch crafts a new narrative of gendered political labor under empire.
Author : Mayo, Katherine
Publisher : Aegitas
Page : 329 pages
File Size : 51,6 Mb
Release : 2015-07-05
Category : History
ISBN : 9781772467369
Mother India, published in 1927, was a polemical book by the American author Katherine Mayo. In her book, Mayo attacked society, religion and culture of the country of India.Written against the Indian demands for self-rule and independence from British rule, the book pointed to the treatment of India's women, the untouchables, animals, dirt, and the character of its nationalistic politicians. Mayo singled out the allegedly rampant and fatally weakening sexuality of its males to be at the core of all problems, leading to masturbation, rape, homosexuality, prostitution, venereal diseases, and, most importantly, premature sexual intercourse and maternity. The book created an outrage across India, and it was burned along with her effigy. It was criticised by Mahatma Gandhi as a "report of a drain inspector sent out with the one purpose of opening and examining the drains of the country to be reported upon". The book prompted over fifty angry books and pamphlets to be published to highlight Mayo's errors and false perception of Indian society, which had become a powerful influence on the American people's view of India.
Author : Ruth Vanita
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 263 pages
File Size : 40,8 Mb
Release : 2013-10-18
Category : History
ISBN : 9781135305888
Queering India is the first book to provide an understanding of same-sex love and eroticism in Indian culture and society. The essays focus on pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial gay and lesbian life in India to provide a comprehensive look at a much neglected topic. The topics are wide-ranging, considering film, literature, popular culture, historical and religious texts, law and other aspects of life in India. Specifically, the essays cover such issues as Deepa Mehta's recent and controversial film, Fire, which focused on lesbian relationships in India; the Indian penal code which outlaws homosexual acts; a case of same-sex love and murder in colonial India; homophobic fiction and homoerotic advertising in current day India; and lesbian subtext in Hindu scripture. All of the essays are original to the collection. Queering India promises to change the way we understand India as well as gay and lesbian life and sexuality around the world.
Author : Richard James Popplewell,Richard J. Popplewell
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 370 pages
File Size : 49,9 Mb
Release : 2018-12-07
Category : History
ISBN : 9781135239336
This is the first book to appear on British intelligence operations based in both India and London, which defended the Indian Empire against subversion during the first two decades of the twentieth century. It is concerned with the threat to the British Raj posed by the Indian revolutionary movement, the resulting development of the imperial intelligence service and the role it played during the First World War.
Author : Mytheli Sreenivas
Publisher : University of Washington Press
Page : 285 pages
File Size : 42,8 Mb
Release : 2021-05-03
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9780295748856
Open-access edition: DOI 10.6069/9780295748856 Beginning in the late nineteenth century, India played a pivotal role in global conversations about population and reproduction. In Reproductive Politics and the Making of Modern India, Mytheli Sreenivas demonstrates how colonial administrators, postcolonial development experts, nationalists, eugenicists, feminists, and family planners all aimed to reform reproduction to transform both individual bodies and the body politic. Across the political spectrum, people insisted that regulating reproduction was necessary and that limiting the population was essential to economic development. This book investigates the often devastating implications of this logic, which demonized some women’s reproduction as the cause of national and planetary catastrophe. To tell this story, Sreenivas explores debates about marriage, family, and contraception. She also demonstrates how concerns about reproduction surfaced within a range of political questions—about poverty and crises of subsistence, migration and claims of national sovereignty, normative heterosexuality and drives for economic development. Locating India at the center of transnational historical change, this book suggests that Indian developments produced the very grounds over which reproduction was called into question in the modern world. The open-access edition of Reproductive Politics and the Making of Modern India is freely available thanks to the TOME initiative and the generous support of The Ohio State University Libraries.
Author : Mahua Sarkar
Publisher : Duke University Press
Page : 356 pages
File Size : 54,6 Mb
Release : 2008-04-25
Category : History
ISBN : 0822342340
DIVArgues that the discursive erasure of Muslim women within colonial and Hindu nationalist discourse underpinned the construction of other identity categories in late colonial Bengal and remains linked to violence against Indian Muslim women today./div
Author : Carol Upadhya,Mario Rutten,Leah Koskimaki
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 194 pages
File Size : 41,8 Mb
Release : 2018-06-27
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781351631075
The movement of people from small towns and villages of India to places outside the country raises a number of questions– about the networks that enable their mobility, the aspirations that motivate them, what they give back to their home regions, and how their provincial home worlds engage with and absorb the consequent transnational flows of money, ideas, influence and care. This book analyzes the social consequences of the transmission of migrant resources to provincial places in India. Bringing together case studies from four regions, it demonstrates that these flows are very diverse, are inflected by regional histories of mobility and development, and may reinforce local power structures or instigate social change in unexpected ways. The chapters collected in this volume examine conflicts over migrant-funded education or rural development projects, how migrants from Dalit, Muslim and other marginalized groups use their new wealth to promote social progress or equality in their home regions, and why migrants invest in property in provincial India or return regularly to their ancestral homes to revitalize ritual traditions. These studies also demonstrate that diaspora philanthropy is routed largely through social networks based on caste, community or kinship ties, thereby extending them spatially, and illustrate how migrant efforts to ‘develop’ their home regions may become entangled in local politics or influence state policies. This collection of eight original ethnographic field studies develops new theoretical insights into the diverse outcomes of international migration and the influences of regional diasporas within India. These collected studies illustrate the various ways in which migrants remain socially, economical and politically influential in their home regions. The book develops a fresh perspective on the connections between transnational migration and processes of development, revealing how provincial India has become deeply globalized. It will be of interest to academics and students in the fields of anthropology, geography, transnational and diaspora studies, and South Asian studies.
Author : Rita Chin
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 380 pages
File Size : 50,9 Mb
Release : 2019-06-11
Category : History
ISBN : 9780691192772
"From the influx of immigrants in the 1950s to contemporary worries about refugees and terrorism, The Crisis of Multiculturalism in Europe examines the historical development of multiculturalism on the Continent. Rita Chin argues that there were few efforts to institute state-sponsored policies of multiculturalism, and those that emerged were pronounced failures virtually from their inception. She shows that today's crisis of support for cultural pluralism isn't new but actually has its roots in the 1980s. Chin looks at the touchstones of European multiculturalism, from the urgent need for laborers after World War II to the public furor over the publication of The Satanic Verses and the question of French girls wearing headscarves to school. While many Muslim immigrants had lived in Europe for decades, in the 1980s they came to be defined by their religion and the public's preoccupation with gender relations. Acceptance of sexual equality became the critical gauge of Muslims' compatibility with Western values. The convergence of left and right around the defense of such personal freedoms against a putatively illiberal Islam has threatened to undermine commitment to pluralism as a core ideal. Chin contends that renouncing the principles of diversity brings social costs, particularly for the left, and she considers how Europe might construct an effective political engagement with its varied population."--Publisher web site
Author : Rochona Majumdar
Publisher : Duke University Press
Page : 357 pages
File Size : 47,7 Mb
Release : 2009-04-13
Category : History
ISBN : 9780822390800
An innovative cultural history of the evolution of modern marriage practices in Bengal, Marriage and Modernity challenges the assumption that arranged marriage is an antiquated practice. Rochona Majumdar demonstrates that in the late colonial period Bengali marriage practices underwent changes that led to a valorization of the larger, intergenerational family as a revered, “ancient” social institution, with arranged marriage as the apotheosis of an “Indian” tradition. She meticulously documents the ways that these newly embraced “traditions”—the extended family and arranged marriage—entered into competition and conversation with other emerging forms of kinship such as the modern unit of the couple, with both models participating promiscuously in the new “marketplace” for marriages, where matrimonial advertisements in the print media and the payment of dowry played central roles. Majumdar argues that together the kinship structures newly asserted as distinctively Indian and the emergence of the marriage market constituted what was and still is modern about marriages in India. Majumdar examines three broad developments related to the modernity of arranged marriage: the growth of a marriage market, concomitant debates about consumption and vulgarity in the conduct of weddings, and the legal regulation of family property and marriages. Drawing on matrimonial advertisements, wedding invitations, poems, photographs, legal debates, and a vast periodical literature, she shows that the modernization of families does not necessarily imply a transition from extended kinship to nuclear family structures, or from matrimonial agreements negotiated between families to marriage contracts between individuals. Colonial Bengal tells a very different story.
Author : Philippa Levine
Publisher : OUP Oxford
Page : 320 pages
File Size : 40,8 Mb
Release : 2007-03-29
Category : History
ISBN : 9780191530395
Focusing the perspectives of gender scholarship on the study of empire, this is an original volume full of fascinating insights about the conduct of men as well as women. Bringing together disparate fields - politics, medicine, sexuality, childhood, religion, migration, and many more topics - this collection of essays demonstrates the richness of studying empire through the lens of gender. This is a more inclusive look at empire, which asks not only why the empire was dominated by men, but how that domination affected the conduct of imperial politics. The fresh, new interpretations of the British Empire offered here, will interest readers across a wide range, demonstrating the vitality of this innovative approach and the new historical questions it raises.
Author : Robin Mitchell
Publisher : University of Georgia Press
Page : 209 pages
File Size : 44,9 Mb
Release : 2020-02-15
Category : History
ISBN : 9780820354330
Even though there were relatively few people of color in postrevolutionary France, images of and discussions about black women in particular appeared repeatedly in a variety of French cultural sectors and social milieus. In Vénus Noire, Robin Mitchell shows how these literary and visual depictions of black women helped to shape the country’s postrevolutionary national identity, particularly in response to the trauma of the French defeat in the Haitian Revolution. Vénus Noire explores the ramifications of this defeat in examining visual and literary representations of three black women who achieved fame in the years that followed. Sarah Baartmann, popularly known as the Hottentot Venus, represented distorted memories of Haiti in the French imagination, and Mitchell shows how her display, treatment, and representation embodied residual anger harbored by the French. Ourika, a young Senegalese girl brought to live in France by the Maréchal Prince de Beauvau, inspired plays, poems, and clothing and jewelry fads, and Mitchell examines how the French appropriated black female identity through these representations while at the same time perpetuating stereotypes of the hypersexual black woman. Finally, Mitchell shows how demonization of Jeanne Duval, longtime lover of the poet Charles Baudelaire, expressed France’s need to rid itself of black bodies even as images and discourses about these bodies proliferated. The stories of these women, carefully contextualized by Mitchell and put into dialogue with one another, reveal a blind spot about race in French national identity that persists in the postcolonial present.
