Download or read book Contentious Traditions written by Lata Mani and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-09-01 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contentious Traditions analyzes the debate on sati, or widow burning, in colonial India. Though the prohibition of widow burning in 1829 was heralded as a key step forward for women's emancipation in modern India, Lata Mani argues that the women who were burned were marginal to the debate and that the controversy was over definitions of Hindu tradition, the place of ritual in religious worship, the civilizing missions of colonialism and evangelism, and the proper role of the colonial state. Mani radically revises colonialist as well as nationalist historiography on the social reform of women's status in the colonial period and clarifies the complex and contradictory character of missionary writings on India. The history of widow burning is one of paradox. While the chief players in the debate argued over the religious basis of sati and the fine points of scriptural interpretation, the testimonials of women at the funeral pyres consistently addressed the material hardships and societal expectations attached to widowhood. And although historiography has traditionally emphasized the colonial horror of sati, a fascinated ambivalence toward the practice suffused official discussions. The debate normalized the violence of sati and supported the misconception that it was a voluntary act of wifely devotion. Mani brilliantly illustrates how situated feminism and discourse analysis compel a rewriting of history, thus destabilizing the ways we are accustomed to look at women and men, at "tradition," custom, and modernity.
Download or read book Women in Colonial India Sati written by Pramod K. Nayar and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 488 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Contentious Traditions written by Lata Mani and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1998-12-30 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "An important and disturbing book. Lata Mani has reopened the archives on widow burning in colonial India. Her meticulous reading of contemporary texts . . . is exemplary for its conceptual sophistication. Unsettling and illuminating, this is feminist scholarship at its best."—Ranajit Guha, founding editor Subaltern Studies "Mani's argument that the terms 'tradition' and 'modernity' are inscribed and reinscribed in the bodies of colonized women has forever changed our understandings of patriarchy, nationalism, and colonialism, and indeed redefined the conditions for 'knowing' with respect to these contexts."—Lisa Lowe, author of Immigration Acts "Lata Mani's brilliant and persuasive analysis of official, native and missionary writings on sati in colonial India makes for a new beginning in contemporary analysis of colonial discourse.This is the book that many have waited for. A landmark publication in several fields at once: modern South Asian history, feminist critiques of colonial discourse, and cultural studies."—Dipesh Chakrabarty, University of Chicago
Download or read book Recasting Women written by Kumkum Sangari and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 1990 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The political and social life of India in the last decade has given rise to a variety of questions concerning the nature and resilience of patriarchal systems in a transitional and post-colonial society. The contributors to this interdisciplinary volume recognize that every aspect of reality is gendered, and that such a recognition involves a dismantling of the ideological presuppositions of the so-called gender neutral ideologies, as well as the boundaries of individual disciplines.
Download or read book India in Early Modern English Travel Writings written by Rita Banerjee and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-07-15 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Comparing the variant ideologies of the representations of India in seventeenth-century European travelogues, India in Early Modern English Travel Narratives concerns a relatively neglected area of study and often overlooked writers. Relating the narratives to contemporary ideas and beliefs, Rita Banerjee argues that travel writers, many of them avid Protestants, seek to negativize India by constructing her in opposition to Europe, the supposed norm, by deliberately erasing affinities and indulging in the politics of disavowal. However, some travelogues show a neutral stance by dispassionate ethnographic reporting, indicating a growing empirical trend. Yet others, influenced by the Enlightenment ideas of diversity, demonstrate tolerance of alien practices and, occasionally, acceptance of the superior rationality of the other's customs.
Download or read book Contentious Traditions written by Lata Mani and published by . This book was released on 1992 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Domesticity in Colonial India written by Judith E. Walsh and published by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. This book was released on 2004 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By the 1880s, Hindu domestic life and its most intimate relationships had become contested ground. For urban, middle-class Indians, the Hindu woman was at the center of a debate over colonial modernity and traditional home and family life. This book sets this debate within the context of a nineteenth-century world where bourgeois, European ideas on the home had become part of a transnational, hegemonic domestic discourse, a 'global domesticity.' But Walsh's interest is more in hybridity than hegemony as she explores what women themselves learned when men sought to teach them through the Indian advice literature of the time. As a younger generation of Indian nationalists and reformers attempted to undercut the authority of family elders and create a 'new patriarchy' of more nuclear and exclusive relations with their wives, elderly women in extended Hindu families learned that their authority in family life (however contingent) was coming to an end.
Download or read book Real and Imagined Women written by Rajeswari Sunder Rajan and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2003-09-02 with total page 157 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1993. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Download or read book Burning Women written by P. Banerjee and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-04-30 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In early modern Europe, the circulation of visual and verbal transmissions of sati, or Hindu widow burning, not only informed responses to the ritualized violence of Hindu culture, but also intersected in fascinating ways with specifically European forms of ritualized violence and European constructions of gender ideology. European accounts of women being burned in India uncannily commented on the burnings of women as witches and criminal wives in Europe. When Europeans narrated their accounts of sati, perhaps the most striking illustration of Hindu patriarchal violence, they did not specifically connect the act of widow burning to a corresponding European signifier: the gruesome ceremonial burnings of women as witches. In examining early modern representations of sati, the book focuses specifically on those strategies that enabled European travellers to protect their own identity as uniquely civilized amidst spectacular displays of 'Eastern barbarity'.
Download or read book En Gendering India written by Sangeeta Ray and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2000-06-20 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DIVExplores the relation of gender and nation in postcolonial writing about India./div
Download or read book Sati written by Meenakshi Jain and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lord Bentinck's Regulation XVII of 1829, which declared sati a criminal offence, marked the culmination of a sustained campaign against Hinduism by British Evangelicals and missionaries anxious to Anglicize and Christianize India. The attack on Hinduism was initiated by the Evangelist, Charles Grant, an employee of the East India Compani and subsequently member of the Court of Directors. In 1792, he presented his famous treatise, Observations on the State of Society among the Asiatic Subjects of Great Britain. A harsh evaluation of Hindu society, it challenged the then current Orientalist policy of respecting Indian laws, religion, and customs set in motion by the Governor General, Warren Hastings. Grant argued that the introduction of the language and religion of the conquerors would be "an obvious means of assimilating the conquered people to them". He was joined in his endeavours by other Evangelicals, and Baptist missionaries who began arriving surreptitiously in Bengal from 1793. This is not a work on sati per se. It does not address, in any depth, issues of the possible origins of the rite; its voluntary or mandatory nature; the role, if any, of priests or family members; or any other aspect associated with the actual practice of widow immolation. Its primary focus is on the colonial debate on sati, particularly the role of Evangelicals and Baptist missionaries. It argues that sati was an "exceptional act," performed by a miniscule number of Hindu widows over the centuries. Its occurrence was, however, exaggerated in the nineteenth century by Evangelicals and Baptist missionaries eager to Anglicize and Christianize India. - from dust jacket.
Download or read book Real and Imagined Widows written by Jyoti Atwal and published by . This book was released on 2016-06-20 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Real and Imagined Widows: Gender Relations in Colonial North India explores the politico-cultural imagination that formed the subtext of the reformist, nationalist and women's discourses on widowhood from the colonial period to the 1950s. The reformist voice and action on widowhood remained loosely defined so that the 1933 Bill in favour of giving property 'rights' to widows continued to be rejected by conservative Hindus in the United Provinces until 1937, when the debate led by Harbilas Sharda acquired a national status. This book examines the legislative debates on the relationship between sexuality, morality, property rights and widowhood. The volume also explores the world of literate widows of the early twentieth century many of whom were also writers. Some of them were conscious of the lacunae in the reformist agenda and developed a unique critique of their own regarding the economic, social and sexual oppression of Hindu widows. Helped by the emergence of a very active Hindi public sphere in the early twentieth century, they could cultivate a literary language of social protest through their autobiographies, poetry, short stories and novels. The complex connection between the nineteenth-century idea of widowhood and the concept of the anti-colonial Mother India of the 1920s transformed the notion of the ideal Hindu widow into a metaphor for a struggling/recovering nation in post-colonial India. In independent India, Nehruvian socialism uniquely combined with Gandhian moral reformism which continued to produce renewed and reformed cultural codes for widows in particular and for Indian women in general.
Download or read book Sati the Blessing and the Curse written by John Stratton Hawley and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1994 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sati symbolizes ultimate loyalty and self-sacrifice. It often figures near the core of a Hindu identity that feels embattled in a modern world. Yet to those who deplore it, sati is a curse, a violation of every woman's womanhood.
Download or read book Women and Law in Colonial India written by Janaki Nair and published by . This book was released on 1996 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Memsahib s Writings written by Indrani Sen and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The white women of colonial India wrote extensively during their years of residence in India. This anthology brings together a fascinating collection of such European women's narratives. Mapped along the historical shifts that took place over the hundred-year period, the book captures the many facets and nuances of gender relations across racial divide. Imaginatively organised around key sites of contact, the narratives are arranged in fourteen thematic clusters. This book will appeal to readers interested in gender and colonialism and the writings of the Raj.
Download or read book Real and Imagined Widows written by Jyoti Atwal and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Real and Imagined Widows: Gender Relations in Colonial North India explores the politico-cultural imagination that formed the subtext of the reformist, nationalist and women's discourses on widowhood from the colonial period to the 1950s. The reformist voice and action on widowhood remained loosely defined so that the 1933 Bill in favour of giving property 'rights' to widows continued to be rejected by conservative Hindus in the United Provinces until 1937, when the debate led by Harbilas Sharda acquired a national status. This book examines the legislative debates on the relationship between sexuality, morality, property rights and widowhood. The volume also explores the world of literate widows of the early twentieth century many of whom were also writers. Some of them were conscious of the lacunae in the reformist agenda and developed a unique critique of their own regarding the economic, social and sexual oppression of Hindu widows. Helped by the emergence of a very active Hindi public sphere in the early twentieth century, they could cultivate a literary language of social protest through their autobiographies, poetry, short stories and novels. The complex connection between the nineteenth-century idea of widowhood and the concept of the anti-colonial Mother India of the 1920s transformed the notion of the ideal Hindu widow into a metaphor for a struggling/recovering nation in post-colonial India. In independent India, Nehruvian socialism uniquely combined with Gandhian moral reformism which continued to produce renewed and reformed cultural codes for widows in particular and for Indian women in general.
Download or read book Gender and Violence in Historical and Contemporary Perspectives written by Jyoti Atwal and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2019-08-08 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book covers a range of issues and phenomena around gender-related violence in specific cultural and regional conditions. Using an interdisciplinary approach, it discusses historical and contemporary developments that trigger violence while highlighting the social conditions, practices, discourses, and cultural experiences of gender-related violence in India. Beginning with the issues of gender-based violence within the traditional context of Indian history and colonial encounters, it moves on to explore the connections between gender, minorities, marginalisation, sexuality, and violence, especially violence against Dalit women, disabled women, and transgender people. It traces and interprets similarities and differences as well as identifies social causes of potential conflicts. Further, it investigates the forms and mechanisms of political, economic, and institutional violence in the legitimation or de-legitimation of traditional gender roles. The chapters deal with sexual violence, violence within marriage and family, influence of patriarchal forces within factory-based gender violence, and global processes such as demand-driven surrogacy and the politics of literary and cinematic representations of gender-based violence. The book situates relevant debates about India and underlines the global context in the making of the gender bias that leads to violence both in the public and private domains. An important contribution to feminist scholarship, this book will be useful to scholars and researchers of gender studies, women’s studies, history, sociology, and political science.
