Gurusand Gifting:Dana, themathreform campaign, and competing visions of Hindusangathanin twentieth-century India

2018 ◽  
Vol 52 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-131 ◽  
Author(s):  
MALAVIKA KASTURI

AbstractFrom the early twentieth century, Hindu socio-religious and political bodies debated the use thatmaths(monastic establishments) made of their wealth, amassed in large part throughdana(socio religious gifts). From the early nineteenth century, Anglo Hindu law on inheritance, and thereafter the Religious and Charitable Endowments Acts, had enabled the autonomy ofmathsby classifying them as private religious corporations, not charitable endowments. This article suggests that themathreform campaign between 1920 and 1940 in north India was impelled by the preoccupations of heterogeneous Hindu political and socio-religious organizations withdanaand its potential to fund cultural and political projects regenerating an imagined Hindu socio-religious community. Specifically, the Hindu Mahasabha yokeddanato its Hindusangathan(unity) campaign to strategically craft an integrated ‘Hindu public’ transcendingsampraday(religious traditions) to protect its interests from ‘external enemies’. My discussion probes how the Hindu Mahasabha and its ‘reformist’ allies urged the conversion ofmathsinto public charitable trusts, or endowments accountable to an ephemeral ‘Hindu public’ and the regulation of their expenditure. Monastic orders,guru-based associations like the Bharat Dharma Mahamandala, and the majority of orthodox Hindus successfully opposed this campaign, defending the interests ofmathsandsampradaybefore and after independence. In so doing, they challenged Hindusangathanby articulating alternative visions of the socio-religious publics and communities to be revitalized through philanthropy. Through this discussion, the article charts the uneasy relationship between monasticism and an emerging Hindu nationalist cultural and political consciousness that remained fractured and internally contested.

1979 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 265-299 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lucy Carroll

Seavoyage was a social reform issue of some concern to the Hindus of Upper India in the latter part of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century. Clearly there were compelling incentives for seavoyage; equally clearly there was a convention which prohibited such travel in the belief that it contravened the law laid down in ancient texts. But social conflict is seldom as one-dimensional as these statements imply.


2004 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-53 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patricia Jeffery ◽  
Roger Jeffery ◽  
Craig Jeffrey

Girls' education has been enduringly controversial in north India, and the disputes of the second half of the nineteenth century and early twentieth century still echo in debates about girls' education in contemporary India. In this paper, we reflect on the education of rural Muslim girls in contemporary western Uttar Pradesh (UP), by examining an Islamic course for girls [Larkiyon kā Islālmī Course], written in Urdu and widely used in madrasahs there. First, we summarize the central themes in the Course: purifying religious practice; distancing demure, self-controlled, respectable woman from the lower orders; and the crucial role of women as competent homemakers. Having noted the conspicuous similarities between these themes and those in the nineteenth and early twentieth-century textbooks and advice manuals for girls and women, the second section examines the context in which the earlier genre emerged. Finally, we return to the present day. Particularly since September 11th 2001, madrasahs have found themselves the focus of hostile allegations that bear little or no relationship to the activities of the madrasahs that we studied. Nevertheless, madrasah education does have problematic implications. The special curricula for girls exemplifies how a particular kind of élite project has been sustained and transformed, and we aim to shed light on contemporary communal and class issues as well as on gender politics.


Author(s):  
Jennifer Bann ◽  
John Corbett

In this chapter, we apply cluster analysis of the graphemic realisations to prose that contains a substantial element of Scots. We worked with a slightly smaller number of texts for the prose samples, owing to the limitations of suitable material in our broader corpus. The Corpus of Modern Scottish Writing contains a considerable amount of prose material, but the use of Scots in prose largely begins with fiction of the early nineteenth century, and extends to the present day. Our chosen texts illustrate a range of nineteenth-and early twentieth-century literary texts that are at least in part in Scots prose.


2018 ◽  
pp. 75-83
Author(s):  
Honey Meconi

Hildegard’s reception, musical and otherwise, is traced in this chapter. After her death, Theoderic of Echternach completed her Vita, and possibly a series of Eight Readings for her feast day. Gebeno of Eberbach excerpted her works in the Pentachronon, and official canonization procedures began in 1228 (though the process concluded only in 2012, followed by Hildegard’s recognition as a Doctor of the Church). Rupertsberg was destroyed in 1632 and Eibingen dissolved in the early nineteenth century; the Abtei Sankt Hildegard was created in the early twentieth century. Revival of the music began in the mid-nineteenth century, with the first complete edition published in 1969. But only in 1982, with recordings from Sequentia and Gothic Voices, did Hildegard’s music really begin to reach a broad audience.


2007 ◽  
Vol 17 ◽  
pp. 129-156 ◽  
Author(s):  
James A. Secord

AbstractThe expansion of print and the rise of specialist disciplines from the early nineteenth century are usually associated with a decline in informed conversation about the sciences and other forms of learning among the aristocracy, gentry and professional classes. Yet an extensive body of evidence suggests that the sciences remained a vital part of conversational culture in England at least through the 1860s. Ultimately, however, discussing specialist knowledge at parties became condemned as ‘talking shop’. This was not so much the result of changes within science, as is usually assumed, but was instead a byproduct of the increasing differentiation of roles throughout society. By the early twentieth century, scientific practitioners had created new places for broad-ranging talk about their subjects, most characteristically in the tea rooms attached to university laboratories.


Slavic Review ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 68 (2) ◽  
pp. 329-334
Author(s):  
William M. Reddy

Each of these rich essays is framed as the discussion of a specific emotion or emotional attitude—the “perception of emotional coldness” (Andrei Zorin), “fear” (Jan Plamper), “disgust” (OlgaMatich and Adi Kuntsman). But these authors offer us both much less and much more. Less, because individual emotions cannot really have their own history, independent of the kinds of self or emotional styles that emerge in given periods. More, because each essay opens u p to these broader, interdependent configurations of self and emotion, creating a window on a complex landscape of emotional change. Zorin's study of Andrei Turgenev provides a glimpse of the transition from an eighteenth- to an early nineteenth-century emotional regime. Plamper's examination of the emergence of military psychology traces the development of a late nineteenth-century social science of the “psyche.” Olga Matich explores the somatic anxieties of an early twentieth-century novelist, reminiscent of a whole strain of troubled and troubling early twentieth-century reflection. Adi Kuntsman probes the powerlessness of victims of Stalinist-era labor camps, whose sufferings resemble those of millions of others caught in modernist state projects aimed at administering mass emotions.


2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 131-152
Author(s):  
Conor Heffernan

In 1949 the Irish branch of the Women’s League of Health and Beauty travelled to Stockholm, Sweden to take part in the second annual Lingiad Festival. Created the previous decade to celebrate the gymnastic system of Per Henrik Ling established in the early nineteenth-century, the Festival was a multisporting cultural event open to groups from around the world. One such group was the Women’s League of Health and Beauty. Founded in London in 1930 by the Irish-born Mary Bagot Stack, the League marked the decade’s most expansive form of exercise for women. Owing to the League’s Irish connection, the first League branch came to Belfast in 1930 and was followed by a Dublin branch some years later. Open to women across the life cycle, the League was targeted at both the working woman and the stay-at-home mother. Where previous studies have examined the creation of the League in Ireland, this piece focuses on the League’s appearance at the 1949 Lingiad. Despite numerous appeals for government funding, the League was forced to raise its own funds for the trip, a point which rankled many journalists both before and after the tournament. There was an inherent tension in the League’s involvement. On the one hand, it offered new opportunities for female exercise and provided a fillip for further engagement. That withstanding, the ongoing difficulties experienced by the League in actually making it to Lingiad highlighted the secondary, and often forgotten, nature of women’s exercise in Ireland at this time. Using memoirs, film and newspaper articles, the piece positions the League’s Lingiad trip as symbolic of both the advances and restrictions inherent in women’s exercise in mid twentieth-century Ireland.


2019 ◽  
pp. 98-108
Author(s):  
Carol Damian

Art historian Carol Damian laments the scarcity of Cuban women artists from the early nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century. Damian explains that this trend was based on both women’s traditional exclusion from art academies and exhibition circuits and difficulties in traveling abroad and establishing their own studios. Yet she documents the work of eight major women artists during the first half of the twentieth century in Cuba, including Mirta Cerra and Gina Pellón. Most of these artists were associated with the San Alejandro Academy of Fine Arts in Havana, participated in numerous exhibitions, and received critical acclaim during their lifetime. However, most critics now neglect them—except for Amelia Peláez—in favor of the canonized male leaders of the Cuban vanguardia. Damian concludes with a call for further research and reflection on the careers of lesser-known female figures and their contributions to Cuban art before and after the country’s independence in 1902.


2007 ◽  
Vol 86 (2) ◽  
pp. 278-313 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Constable

This article examines the Scottish missionary contribution to a Scottish sense of empire in India in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Initially, the article reviews general historiographical interpretations which have in recent years been developed to explain the Scottish relationship with British imperial development in India. Subsequently the article analyses in detail the religious contributions of Scottish Presbyterian missionaries of the Church of Scotland and the Free Church Missions to a Scottish sense of empire with a focus on their interaction with Hindu socioreligious thought in nineteenth-century western India. Previous missionary historiography has tended to focus substantially on the emergence of Scottish evangelical missionary activity in India in the early nineteenth century and most notably on Alexander Duff (1806–78). Relatively little has been written on Scottish Presbyterian missions in India in the later nineteenth century, and even less on the significance of their missionary thought to a Scottish sense of Indian empire. Through an analysis of Scottish Presbyterian missionary critiques in both vernacular Marathi and English, this article outlines the orientalist engagement of Scottish Presbyterian missionary thought with late nineteenth-century popular Hinduism. In conclusion this article demonstrates how this intellectual engagement contributed to and helped define a Scottish missionary sense of empire in India.


Author(s):  
Julian Wright

This chapter asks wider questions about the flow of time as it was explored in this historical writing. It focuses on Jaurès’ philosophy of history, initially through a brief discussion of his doctoral thesis and the essay entitled ‘Le bilan social du XIXème siècle’ that he provided at the end of the Histoire socialiste, then through the work of three of his collaborators, Gabriel Deville, Eugène Fournière, and Georges Renard. One of the most important challenges for socialists in the early twentieth century was to understand the damage and division caused by revolution, while not losing the transformative mission of their socialism. With these elements established, the chapter returns to Jaurès, and in particular the long study of nineteenth-century society in chapter 10 of L’Armée nouvelle. Jaurès advanced an original vision of the nineteenth century and its meaning for the socialist present.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document