‘Innocent’ Victims/‘Guilty’ Migrants: Hindi public sphere, caste and indentured women in colonial North India

2015 ◽  
Vol 49 (5) ◽  
pp. 1345-1377 ◽  
Author(s):  
CHARU GUPTA
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
British Empire ◽  
North India ◽  
Migrant Women ◽  
Subjective Experiences ◽  
Transnational Movements ◽  
Indian Women ◽  
Early Twentieth Century

AbstractThis article analyses representations of the indentured woman in the Hindi print-public sphere of colonial north India in the early twentieth century. There have been sophisticated studies on the condition of Indian women in the plantation colonies of the British Empire, this article focuses instead on the vernacular world within India, showing how the transnational movements of these women emigrants led to animated discussions, in which they came to be constructed as both innocent victims and guilty migrants, insiders and outsiders. The ways in which these mobile women came to be represented reveal significant intersections between nation, gender, caste, sexuality, and morality. It also demonstrates how middle-class Indian women attempted to establish bonds of diasporic sisterhood with low-caste indentured women, bonds that were also deeply hierarchical. In addition, the article attempts to grasp the subjective experiences of Dalit migrant, and potentially migrant, women themselves, and illustrates their ambivalences of identity in particularly gendered ways.

Women's Voices, Men's Lives: Masculinity in a North Indian Urdu newspaper

2016 ◽  
Vol 50 (5) ◽  
pp. 1441-1473 ◽  
Author(s):  
MEGAN EATON ROBB
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Gender Roles ◽  
Religious Beliefs ◽  
North India ◽  
Class Identity ◽  
Women Warriors ◽  
Women's Voices ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Literary Journals

AbstractLiterary journals and newspapers aiming to reform the religious beliefs and domestic habits of women were common in early twentieth-century North India. Although most readings have focused on how these texts reflected male legislation of women's behaviour, we should look at Muslim reformist literature to understand male experiences; this investigation offers new insights into an emergent middle-class identity defined more by manners than birth. Readings of a previously little-researched Urdu newspaper, Madinah, and its women's section offer new insights on male experiences of reformism, characterized by profound ambivalence. Playfulness emerged in some reformist descriptions of women's voices, channelling the influence of rekhti. Ultimately Madinah cultivated pride in Islam's strict division of gender roles and conversely threatened men with shame for failing to regulate uneducated women. Descriptions of powerful, Ottoman women warriors were framed to incite men to acts of bravery, using reports from Europe as cautionary examples of the over-indulgence of women. While the newspaper offered outlets for men to express curiosity about women's experiences, ultimately reformist literature limited expressions of pleasure. Male ambivalence regarding the implications of the reformist project remained embedded in writing about women.

Conclusion

2018 ◽  
pp. 223-227
Author(s):  
Shobna Nijhawan
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Text And Image ◽  
Actual Role ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Hindu Women

The conclusion addresses the question revolving around literature, visuals, and visibility as well as acts of reading and seeing. Offering knowledge did not mean that Sudhā (and other periodicals) was read and digested as intended by the contributors, editors, and publishers. Similarly, the increased number of women’s depictions does not allow for conclusions concerning the actual role of middle-class Hindu women in the early twentieth century. Text and image combined, however, significantly contributed to the imagining and the making of the Hindi public sphere in the early twentieth century by Sudhā and Gaṅgā Pustak Mālā.

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.

Englishness, Empire and Nostalgia: A Heterodox Religious Community's Appeal in the Inter-War Years

2018 ◽  
Vol 54 ◽  
pp. 374-392
Author(s):  
Jane Shaw
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War I ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Belief Networks ◽  
Healing Ministry ◽  
World War ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The World ◽  
Sense Of Identity ◽  
The Rich

This article looks at the ways in which the Panacea Society – a heterodox, millenarian group based in Bedford during the inter-war years – spread its ideas: through personal, familial and shared belief networks across the British empire; by building new modes of attracting adherents, in particular a global healing ministry; and by shipping its publications widely. It then examines how the society appealed to its (white) members in the empire in three ways: through its theology, which put Britain at the centre of the world; by presuming the necessity and existence of a ‘Greater Britain’ and the British empire, while in so many other quarters these entities were being questioned in the wake of World War I; and by a deliberately cultivated and nostalgic notion of ‘Englishness’. The Panacea Society continued and developed the idea of the British empire as providential at a time when the idea no longer held currency in most circles. The article draws on the rich resource of letters in the Panacea Society archive to contribute to an emerging area of scholarship on migrants’ experience in the early twentieth-century British empire (especially the dominions) and their sense of identity, in this case both religious and British.

Caste-Less Tamils and Early Print Public Sphere: Remembering Iyothee Thass (1845–914)

2021 ◽  
pp. 026272802110348
Author(s):  
Dickens Leonard
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
South Asia ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
Indian History ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
History Of

Responding to the history of Dalit invisibility in print public sphere, this article explores one of the earliest Dalit articulations in print in South Asia during the colonial period. Extending studies on anti-caste thought by foregrounding the Tamil cosmopolis, this conceptualises how the most oppressed by caste engaged with print in the early twentieth century, through studying the works on and of Pandit Iyothee Thass and his movement. The article proposes that these experiments with print opened the chance of a political to emerge, which was otherwise foreclosed, towards wording a caste-less community at this earlier time in Indian history.

Flower Empowerment

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nancy Stalker
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Gender Norms ◽  
Japanese Women ◽  
Educational Reforms ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Job Opportunities ◽  
Paid Labor ◽  
Upper Middle Class

Ikebana, the art of Japanese flower arranging, was first systematized in the fifteenth century, when it was limited to elite male practitioners. It was first widely practiced by women in the early twentieth century, but did not reach mass popularity until the 1950s and 1960s, with an estimated ten million students, over 99 percent of whom were female. While it was still considered by many to be a domestic skill for upper-middle-class housewives, it increasingly offered employment for postwar Japanese women as teachers and even as headmasters (iemoto) of their own schools, allowing women to engage in paid labor without violating traditional gender norms. This chapter traces the trajectory of job opportunities for women in ikebana, examining how educational reforms in the Meiji and postwar periods provided chances to study and obtain teaching licenses in ikebana and how the three largest schools—Ikenobo, Ohara, and Sogetsu—increasingly professionalized their corps of teachers.

Not a Fanatic

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Wuthnow
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Self Control ◽  
American Religion ◽  
Religious Leaders ◽  
Popular Press ◽  
Public Officials ◽  
Early Twentieth Century

One of the more difficult aspects of middle-class respectability has been getting it right when it comes to displays of emotion—too little and a person seems stoical, indifferent, cold; too much and a person is likely to be accused of wearing their feelings on their sleeve, incapable of self-control, being dangerous, overzealous, a fanatic. Religion is a particularly interesting context in which to consider the display of emotion. This chapter examines how accusations of zealotry populated nineteenth- and early twentieth-century discussions of American religion. Zealotry was a contested idea that religious leaders, public officials, scholars, and the popular press discussed repeatedly. It was good, many commentators argued, for Americans to be zealous. But it was not good to be labeled a zealot. Zealots were led too much by their emotions. They were easily confused, frequently irrational, and sometimes dangerous.

Wonder House

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca Onion
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Science Education ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Children's Museum

The Brooklyn Children’s Museum, the first children’s museum in the country, aimed its offerings at middle-class children who they saw as independent strivers. In discussing the types of science education available at their museum, the educators who ran the Brooklyn Children’s Museum showed how science education for boys in the early twentieth century was pitched at a higher level than the equivalent offerings for girls.

Ordering Empire and Democracy, 1902–1921

2020 ◽  
pp. 24-67
Author(s):  
Tobias Harper
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
British Empire ◽  
British Society ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
New Order ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Opening Up

This chapter examines the creation of new orders at the beginning of the twentieth century, which was the culmination of a prolonged period of “unprecedented honorific inventiveness” starting in the late nineteenth century. In Britain the new Order of the British Empire was branded the “Order of Britain’s Democracy” in recognition of the fact that it extended far deeper into non-elite classes in British society than any previous honour. Between 1917 and 1921 more than 20,000 people in Britain and throughout the British Empire were added to this new Order. This was an unprecedented number, orders of magnitude larger than honours lists in previous years. While the new Order was successful in reaching a wider, more middle-class audience than the honours system before the war, which was socially narrow, there was a substantial backlash to what was widely perceived by elites to be an excessive (and diluting) opening-up of the “fount of honour.” This backlash was connected to political controversies about the sale of honours that eventually helped bring about Lloyd George’s downfall. This chapter also contains a brief description of all the components of the British honours system at the beginning of the twentieth century.

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