‘Asceticising’ Monastic Families: Ascetic Genealogies, Property Feuds and Anglo-Hindu Law in Late Colonial India

2009 ◽  
Vol 43 (5) ◽  
pp. 1039-1083 ◽  
Author(s):  
MALAVIKA KASTURI
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Sacred Spaces ◽  
Northern India ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Legal Discourses ◽  
Sexuality And Gender ◽  
Women And Children ◽  
And Gender

AbstractThis paper examines a fundamental premise of Anglo-Hindu law on succession between 1860 and 1940, that kinship was emblematic of secular modes of living, to analyse its implications for the assertion of masculinity within ascetic orders in northern India. Legal discourses engaged with rights to succession within ascetic orders, by functioning on the assumption that the renunciatory life of ascetics was antithetical to sexuality and domesticity. This institutionalization of law, that defined asceticism and fixed ascetic masculinities within a legal frame, occurred with the consent of ascetic orders concerned with the ownership and distribution of property, even though sexuality and gender played a central role in shaping relationships within sacred spaces. Myriad ties embracing the language of kinship shaped ascetic orders. Bonds of sentiment and sexual attachment over-lapped with, sustained, and produced the bonds tying spiritual preceptors to their disciples. Relationships within ascetic families, consisting of men, their female companions, children and relatives, along with their attendant obligations were validated through rights of ownership and inheritance to property. Taking advantage of Anglo-Hindu law by the early twentieth century, ascetic orders sought to ‘purify’ their genealogies through the medium of property disputes fought in colonial courts. By manipulating the legal meanings ascribed to asceticism, masculinity and renunciation, these orders effaced unwanted members from their orders with varying degrees of success, especially women and children.

scholarly journals Stimulation, Segregation and Scandal: Geographies of Prostitution Regulation in British India, between Registration (1888) and Suppression (1923)

2012 ◽  
Vol 46 (6) ◽  
pp. 1459-1505 ◽  
Author(s):  
STEPHEN LEGG
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Central Government ◽  
British India ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Contagious Diseases ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Women And Children ◽  
The Government ◽  
The Military ◽  
Indian Cities

AbstractThis paper explores the regulation of prostitution in colonial India between the abolition of the Indian Contagious Diseases Act in 1888 and the passing of the first Suppression of Immoral Traffic Act in 1923. It challenges the commonly held assumption that prostitutes naturally segregated themselves in Indian cities, and shows that this was a policy advocated by the Government of India. The object was to prevent the military visiting these segregated areas, in the absence of effective Cantonment Regulations for registering, inspecting, and treating prostitutes. The central government stimulated provincial segregation through expressing its desires via demi-official memoranda and confidential correspondence, to which Rangoon and Bombay responded most willingly. The second half of the paper explores the conditions, in both India and Ceylon, that made these segregated areas into scandalous sites in the early twentieth century. It situates the brothel amongst changing beliefs that they: increased rather than decreased incidents of homosexuality; stimulated trafficking in women and children; and encouraged the spread of scandalous white prostitutes ‘up-country’, beyond their tolerated location in coastal cosmopolitan ports. Taken alongside demands that the state support social reform in the early twentieth century, segregation provided the tipping point for the shift towards suppression from 1917 onwards. It also illustrates the scalar shifts in which central-local relations, and relations between provinces, in government were being negotiated in advance of the dyarchy system formalized in 1919.

Reinventing Ramanand: Caste and History in Gangetic India

1996 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 549-571 ◽  
Author(s):  
William R. Pinch
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
English Language ◽  
Ninth Century ◽  
Religious History ◽  
North India ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Indian History ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Literature And Religion ◽  
History Of

According to Sir George Grierson, one of the pre-eminent Indologists of the early twentieth century, Ramanand led ‘one of the most momentous revolutions that have occurred in the religious history of North India.’Yet Ramanand, the fourteenth-century teacher of Banaras, has been conspicuous by his relative absence in the pages of English-language scholarship on recent Indian history, literature, and religion. The aims of this essay are to reflect on why this is so, and to urge historians to pay attention to Ramanand, more particularly to the reinvention of Ramanand by his early twentieth-century followers, because the contested traditions thereof bear on the vexed issue of caste and hierarchy in colonial India. The little that is known about Ramanand is doubly curious considering that Ramanandis, those who look to Ramanand for spiritual and community inspiration, are thought to comprise the largest and most important Vaishnava monastic order in north India. Ramanandis are to be found in temples and monasteries throughout and beyond the Hindi-speaking north, and they are largely responsible for the upsurge in Ram-centered devotion in the last two centuries. A fairly recent anthropological examination of Ayodhya, currently the most important Ramanand pilgrimage center in India, has revealed that Ramanandi sadhus, or monks, can be grouped under three basic headings: tyagi (ascetic), naga (fighting ascetic), and rasik (devotional aesthete).4 The increased popularity of the order in recent centuries is such that Ramanandis may today outnumber Dasnamis, the better-known Shaiva monks who look to the ninth-century teacher, Shankaracharya, for their organizational and philosophical moorings.

Book review: Sujata Mukherjee, Gender, Medicine, and Society in Colonial India: Women’s Health Care in Nineteenth and Early Twentieth-Century Bengal

2021 ◽  
Vol 41 (3) ◽  
pp. 453-456
Author(s):  
Bikash Das
Keyword(s):  
Health Care ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Women’S Health ◽  
Women's Health ◽  
New Delhi ◽  
Gender Medicine ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Oxford University ◽  
Women's Health Care ◽  
Early Twentieth Century

Sujata Mukherjee, Gender, Medicine, and Society in Colonial India: Women’s Health Care in Nineteenth and Early Twentieth-Century Bengal (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2017), xxxv + 223 pp.

A Homosocial Priesthood of All Believers: Laity and Gender in Interwar Sweden

2019 ◽  
Vol 88 (2) ◽  
pp. 440-464
Author(s):  
Martin Nykvist
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Church Of Sweden ◽  
Priesthood Of All Believers ◽  
Gender Differentiation ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Church Life ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The Church

Around the turn of the twentieth century, there was a growing concern within the Church of Sweden that the church was, to a too large extent, managed by the clergy alone. In an attempt to give the laity a more active and influential role in the Church of Sweden, the Brethren of the Church was established in 1918. Since it was only possible for men to become members, the organization simultaneously addressed a different issue: the view that women had become a much too salient group in church life. This process was described by the Brethren and similar groups as a “feminization” of the church, a phrasing which later came to be used by historians and theologians to explain changes in Western Christianity in the nineteenth century. In other words, the Brethren considered questions of gender vital to their endeavor to create a church in which the laity held a more prominent position. This article analyzes how the perceived feminization and its assumed connection to secularization caused enhanced attempts to uphold and strengthen gender differentiation in the Church of Sweden in the early twentieth century. By analyzing an all-male lay organization, the importance of homosociality in the construction of Christian masculinities will also be discussed.

Edna St. Vincent Millay and Anne Sexton: The Disruption of Domestic Bliss

2004 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 67-88 ◽  
Author(s):  
ARTEMIS MICHAILIDOU
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Gender Stereotypes ◽  
New Woman ◽  
American Poetry ◽  
Anne Sexton ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
The Subject ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Second Wave

Popular perceptions of Edna St. Vincent Millay do not generally see her as a poet interested in so-called “domestic poetry.” On the contrary, Millay is most commonly described as the female embodiment of the rebellious spirit that marked the 1920s, the “New Woman” of early twentieth-century feminism. Until the late 1970s, the subject of domesticity seemed incompatible with the celebrated images of Millay's “progressiveness,” “rebelliousness,” or “originality.” But then again, by the 1970s Millay was no longer seen as particularly rebellious or original, and the fact that she had also contributed to the tradition of domestic poetry was not to her advantage. Domesticity may have been an important issue for second-wave feminists, but it was discussed rather selectively and, outside feminist circles, Millay was hardly ever mentioned by literary critics. The taint of “traditionalism” did not help Millay's cause, and the poet's lifelong exploration of sexuality, femininity and gender stereotypes was somehow not enough to generate sophisticated critical analyses. Since Millay seemed to be a largely traditional poet and a “politically incorrect” feminist model, second-wave feminists preferred to focus on other figures, classified as more modern and more overtly subversive. Scholarly recognition of Millay's significance within the canon of modern American poetry did not really begin until the 1990s.

scholarly journals Thrifty Trustees, Curriculum Clashes, and Gender Disparities: Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Barriers in Education in Rural Renfrew County

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joshua C. Blank
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Rural Communities ◽  
Community Members ◽  
Rural Teachers ◽  
Barriers To Education ◽  
Gender Barriers ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The One

As several scholars contend, there is a paucity of material on the lives of thousands of rural teachers who taught in one-room Ontario schools and helped to build late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century rural communities. This article enriches the discourse on Canadian schooling by closely studying the life of one rural teacher, Elizabeth (Etmanski) Shalla, and several of her descendants by giving a glimpse into the one-room schoolhouse of yesteryear. More specifically, their first-hand experiences, as well as those of community members in western Renfrew County, sheds new light on geographical barriers to education and jurisdictional struggles between trustees and school inspectors and adds to the discourse on gender barriers and financial disparities in the struggle to obtain an, and maintain a life in, education on the rural Ontario frontier.

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