The Subhedar’s Son: A Narrative of Brahmin-Christian Conversion from Nineteenth-Century Maharashtra, edited by Deepra Dandekar

2020 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 79-82
Author(s):  
Robert Eric Frykenberg
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Western India ◽  
Local Churches ◽  
Christian Conversion ◽  
British Raj ◽  
Cultural Legacy ◽  
Critical Scholarship

This son of a former local ruler, from the elite Brahman community that had presided over the fortunes of the Maratha Empire before its defeat by the British Raj, became a Christian convert and then served as a pastor of local churches in Western India for nearly forty years. His autobiography was later turned into a prize-winning novel. This rare pioneering vernacular account, reflecting the highly complex, multilayered cultural legacy of an emerging hybrid Christianity, represented a new genre of nativist devotion and piety. Subjected to a carefully contextualized and critical scholarship, we now have this work in English.

Scottish Missionaries, ‘Protestant Hinduism’ and the Scottish Sense of Empire in Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-century India

2007 ◽  
Vol 86 (2) ◽  
pp. 278-313 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Constable
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Western India ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Church Of Scotland ◽  
Free Church ◽  
Intellectual Engagement ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Church

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.

Land, Landlords, and the British Raj: Northern India in the Nineteenth Century

1980 ◽  
Vol 85 (4) ◽  
pp. 965
Author(s):  
Charles H. Heimsath ◽  
Thomas R. Metcalf
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
British Raj ◽  
Northern India

The Languages of Petitioning in Early Colonial India

2019 ◽  
Vol 43 (3) ◽  
pp. 581-597 ◽  
Author(s):  
James A. Jaffe
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Western India ◽  
Rhetorical Strategies ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
The Public ◽  
The People ◽  
Early Colonial ◽  
The Social ◽  
Different Levels

With relatively few exceptions, personal petitions from individuals have received much less attention from historians than those from groups in the public political sphere. In one sense, personal petitions adopted many of the same rhetorical strategies as those delivered by a group. However, they also offer unique insights into the quotidian relationship between the people and their rulers. This article examines surviving personal petitions to various administrators at different levels of government in western India during the decades surrounding the East India Company’s conquests. The analysis of these petitions helps to refine our understanding of the place of the new judicial system in the social world of early-nineteenth-century India, especially by illuminating the discourse of justice that petitioners brought to the presentation of their cases to their new governors. The conclusion of this article seeks to place the rhetoric of personal petitioning within the larger context of mass political petitioning in India during the early nineteenth century.

Pain of Privacy

2020 ◽  
pp. 110-132
Author(s):  
Susmita Roye
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Women Writers ◽  
Muslim Women ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Gradual Rise ◽  
Prescriptive Authority ◽  
British Raj ◽  
Women’S Representation ◽  
Western Imagination

If the rite of widow-immolation fired Western imagination at the turn of the nineteenth century, then purdah (life in seclusion) held captive the West’s attention at the turn of the twentieth. Purdah took on a special connotation especially during the British Raj. With the gradual rise of the novel ideas of nationhood across religions, languages or cultures of the subcontinent, purdah became more than the sceptre of male prescriptive authority for upholding religious/cultural precepts of a community. It became further charged as the confrontational ground of conflicting authority—for one race to rule and for the other to forge its identity as a self-ruling nation. Not only is women’s representation of purdah in their writings considered more authentic but they also often challenge the stereotyping of a purdahnashin and reject the broad-brushed, mono-toned portrayal of their existence. Although Hindus too practised purdah of a sort, this chapter focuses on two Muslim women writers (Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain and Iqbalunnissa Hussain).

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