Mapping Dowry Exchanges: Snapshots of Nineteenth Century Palm Leaves

2012 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 15
Author(s):  
Ignatius Payyappilly
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Crucial Point ◽  
Family Problems ◽  
Christian Communities ◽  
Cultural Impacts ◽  
The People ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Custom ◽  
Christian Families ◽  
Palm Leave

The Palm leave records of the Syrian Christian communities in Kerala, belonging to eighteenth and nineteenth century, remain as evidences of the practice of dowry (Stridhanam) among the Syrian Christians and donations such as passaram, nadavazhakkam, kurippanam, kudappanam etc made to the churches and priests in relation to the marriage. Records say that this social custom, also known as Stridhanam was a crucial point of marriage and it was very often a matter of dispute and family problems. In spite of all disputes and difficulties existed in the Syrian Christian families and in the society at large because of this custom, no church record could be traced against this system. This paper is an attempt to explore and analyse the nature and practice of this social custom among Syrian Christians in the nineteenth century, who are Christian in faith and religion but are not different from the Hindus in their social customs and practices. Likewise, this paper is an attempt to analyse the social and cultural impacts of dowry (stridhanam) and the attitude of the society as well as that of Church authorities towards this custom and how did they tax the people in connection with the marriage. Keywords: Dowry; stridhanam; syrian christians; passaram; nadavazhakkam; palm leave records; christian marriage

scholarly journals Man Slaving to Divine: A Socio-religious Custom Gleaned from the Nineteenth Century Palm Leaves

2012 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Ignatius Payyappilly
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Religious Practice ◽  
Christian Communities ◽  
Spiritual Senses ◽  
Christian Churches ◽  
Social Custom ◽  
The Church ◽  
Palm Leaf ◽  
Palm Leave

This paper is an attempt to explore and analyse the practice of the institution of slavery observed by the Syrian Christian communities in Kerala. There are eighteenth and nineteenth century palm leaf (manuscript) records in the Syrian Christian churches in Kerala establishing the same which needs to be understood in its secular and spiritual senses since these records are evidence of both the secular practice of slavery as a social custom and a religious practice of adima (slave) offering as a spiritual activity. So also, this paper is an attempt to explore and analyse the origin of adimappanam or adimakasu found in the Church records. Keywords: Syrian Christians; Slavery; Palm leave records; Adima; Adimappanam; Slave offering

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.

Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century England: the social context of illegitimacy in rural Kent

Rural History ◽  
1990 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 219-247 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barry Reay
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Context ◽  
Lower Class ◽  
General Phenomenon ◽  
Local Study ◽  
The Past ◽  
The People ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Subject

More bad history has been written about sex than any other subject. Our ignorance about the sexual attitudes and behaviour of people in the past is compounded by a desire to rush to rash generalisation. This is unfortunate, for (consciously or not) our perceptions of the present are shaped by our assumptions about the past. Britain's current preoccupation with ‘Victorian values’ is but a politically visible example of a more general phenomenon. And, more specifically, we do not know a great deal about lower-class sexuality in nineteenth-century England. There are studies of bourgeois desires and sensibilities, but little on the mores of the vast bulk of the population.As Jean Robin has demonstrated recently, one of the most fruitful approaches to the subject is the detailed local study – the micro-study. It may not appeal to those with a penchant for the broad sweep, but such an approach can provide a useful entry into the sexual habits of the people of the past. This article is intended as a follow-up to Robin's work. It deals with a part of rural Kent and, like Robin's work, it covers an aspect of nineteenth-century sexuality – in this case, the social context of illegitimacy. More particularly, this study (and here I differ from Robin) will question the usefulness of the concept of a ‘bastardy-prone sub-society’ (more of which later), a term still favoured by many historical sociologists. The experience of rural Kent suggests that bearing children outside marriage should be seen not as a form of deviancy but rather as part of normal sexual culture.

scholarly journals Battling "the bane of our cities": Class, territory, and the prohibition debate in Toronto, 1877

2013 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 30-48
Author(s):  
M. P. Sendbuehler
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Alcohol Abuse ◽  
Urban Life ◽  
Class Politics ◽  
The People ◽  
The Social ◽  
Local Option ◽  
Public Drinking ◽  
The City ◽  
Urban Working

In the nineteenth century, the tavern was an important institution in urban working-class life. Because of the social ills associated with alcohol abuse and public drinking, there were frequent attempts to lessen the tavern's importance or to eliminate it entirely. This paper examines several tavern-related issues that emerged in Toronto in the 1870s and 1880s. The Crooks Act, passed in 1876, employed powerful measures to deal with political and temperance questions simultaneously. The intersection of class, politics, temperance, and urban life led to a territorial solution to the liquor question. These issues were dealt with by the people of Toronto in 1877, when they declined to prohibit public drinking in the city via the Dunkin Act, a local option prohibition statute of the Province of Canada.

Spirit of Place: The European Fashioning of Toowoomba

1996 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 24-30 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Lee
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Coastal Plain ◽  
Temperate Climate ◽  
European Settlement ◽  
European Climate ◽  
The People ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
Spirit Of Place ◽  
Moderate Elevation

No other town in Queensland is so well favoured by nature for combining these rare advantages. We have the healthiness of climate, the coolness of a fine English summer, the pure and rarefied air of a moderate elevation, which dwellers along the hot and humid coast so much desire. We have beauty of scenery in picturesque variety, with a panorama of rolling Downs and far-reaching plain … ours is the first town on the elevated Downs after rising from the close and exhausting atmosphere of the ‘littoral’ country.So rhapsodised the editorial in the Toowoomba Chronicle on 14 June, 1890. From the nineteenth century the drop in temperature which greeted the traveller's ascent to the elevated tablelands of the Darling Downs was greeted as a sign of a more vitalising and health-giving climate than the sub-tropical humidity of the Brisbane coastal plain. Katie Hume in 1866 felt Toowoomba's air 'cool and English like … after the heat of Brisbane’, while the consumptive Walter Coote argued in 1887 that the Downs possessed ‘a climate as healthful and even invigorating as that of any place in the World’ (Hume 160, Coote 201). The Social-Darwinist connection between the moral character of a people and the temperature of their climate was a frequent theme of nineteenth century culture. The imperial triumphs of European civilisation were often explained by Europe's temperate climate, for the cooler the climate the more ‘civil’ the people are deemed to be (Spurr); and Europe's temperate climate was also an acknowledged cause of the reasoned moral restraint of the civilised colonial settler. Thus the celebration of Toowoomba's ‘European’ climate served to familiarise an alien Australian space as a place which would support European settlement.

Eliza Orzeszkowa Among Positivist Writers from the Perspective of Warsaw. Leopold Méyet’s Letters to Eliza Orzeszkowa

Tekstualia ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (63) ◽  
pp. 105-134
Author(s):  
Piotr Bordzoł
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Polish Literature ◽  
Literary Research ◽  
The People ◽  
Political Events ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Status ◽  
Jewish Descent ◽  
Academy Of Sciences ◽  
Literary Quality

The article discusses Leopold Méyet’s selected letters to Eliza Orzeszkowa from the period 1878–1910. The original manuscripts are kept in the Eliza Orzeszkowa Archive in the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences. Leopold Méyet was an attorney, writer, publisher, social activist and philanthropist of Jewish descent, and he lived in Warsaw in the second half of the nineteenth century. Orzeszkowa then resided in Grodno. Méyet’s letters do not represent a high literary quality, and should rather be considered as a collection of personal details about the author and the addressee, recounting his efforts to publish Orzeszkowa’s works or his struggles with the Russian administration and censorship. Méyet also portrays the people of his time, looks at the social and political events and discusses the significance of literature or the status of a writer. A specific concern of some of the letters is Orzeszkowa’s place in Polish literature toward the end of the nineteenth century.

‘…Of real use to the people’

2011 ◽  
Vol 48 (4) ◽  
pp. 497-529
Author(s):  
Savithri Preetha Nair
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Historical Contingency ◽  
Long Distance ◽  
Useful Knowledge ◽  
The People ◽  
Cultural Boundaries ◽  
The Social ◽  
Historical Episode ◽  
European Technology

This article throws light on the self-consciously modern attempt on the part of Raja Serfoji II (r. 1798–1832) of Tanjore, South India to establish a Devanagari press in 1802–07 for the dissemination of ‘useful knowledge’. Adopting a social constructivist approach, this article concerns itself with the locality, materiality and the historical contingency of knowledge production, thus opting for a highly detailed case study of the Tanjore press. It focuses on people, objects, knowledge, technologies and labour that flowed along short- and long-distance networks connecting the local and the global in the early nineteenth century, to produce the printed book in the ‘locality’ called Tanjore. The article argues that the superior and elegant Devanagari types cast for Serfoji were not simply ‘crafted out’ of a European template, but were the result of a five-year long typographical experiment funded and directed by the Tanjore court involving several kinds of expertise that cut across geographical and cultural boundaries. Serfoji’s celebration of the social and intellectual uses of this piece of European technology so early in the nineteenth century is indeed a remarkable historical episode, and a reflection of the nature of enlightened modernity he wished to articulate through the vernacular printed book.

Division of Purpose in George Gissing

PMLA ◽  
1955 ◽  
Vol 70 (3) ◽  
pp. 323-336
Author(s):  
Jacob Korg
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Educational Reform ◽  
Social Reform ◽  
Final Analysis ◽  
Social Realism ◽  
George Gissing ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The People ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Novels

Most of George Gissing's social novels bear the mark of an allegiance divided between social reform and art. Each begins by addressing itself to some problem of nineteenth-century civilization, such as poverty, Mammonism, socialism, rack-renting, educational reform, or the position of women, depicting evil conditions with powerful social realism. As the novel proceeds, however, social questions are gradually relegated to the background, and the story becomes a steady and, at best, inevitable unfolding of events whose course is determined in the final analysis by the characters of the people involved in it. There may be frequent reversions to “problems” and these may have some effect on the action, but a dénouement that fails to correspond with the social theme, or even contradicts it, makes it apparent that the novel of plot and character has usurped the place of the novel of protest. This inconsistency may well be one of the reasons why such social novels as Workers in the Dawn (1880), The Unclassed (1884), Demos (1886), Thyrza (1887), and The Nether World (1889) failed to win Gissing any but the smallest public, although they were recognized as faithful and moving portrayals of conditions that demanded reform. One reviewer of The Nether World pointed clearly to the ambiguity characteristic of Gissing's work by saying: “It is difficult to discover whether he hoped to add to that sort of fiction which has at times been more successful than Blue-books or societies in calling attention to evils crying for remedy or whether … the author chose his subject in something like an artistic spirit… His work does not show the energy either of an artist or of an enthusiast …”

scholarly journals The Quest for Teachers of the ‘Right Stamp’ as Prerequisite to Progress of Female Education in Eastern Bengal: The Partition Interlude

2012 ◽  
pp. 53-74
Author(s):  
Asha Islam Nayeem
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Early Marriage ◽  
Female Education ◽  
Female Teachers ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Custom ◽  
The Right ◽  
Public Instruction ◽  
Out Of School

When the nineteenth century came to its glorious end, in Bengal, the storm surrounding the question of women’s education had settled in favor of progress. Conditions for the spread of female education, however, were still precarious, to say the very least. The three chief deterrents to the spread of female education, as recorded in official documents, were: (a) the custom of early marriage, after which girls dropped out of school and more often than not lapsed into ignorance; (b) the system of purdah, the social custom which prevented grown up girls from venturing out of the house to attend school; and, (c) the lack of female teachers (Report on Public Instruction, 1899-1900).DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3329/afj.v4i0.12932 The Arts Faculty Journal Vol.4 July 2010-June 2011 pp.53-74

Counterrevolutionary Traditionalism

Tocqueville ◽  
2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lucien Jaume
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Democratic Republic ◽  
Social Bond ◽  
General Interest ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
The People ◽  
The Social ◽  
Forms Of Life ◽  
The Way

In the counterrevolutionary school, it remained an article of faith from the time of the Directory to the end of the nineteenth century that individualism is destructive of the social bond, that it is impossible to create a society from individual atoms. This chapter argues that Tocqueville did not believe that one could simply say that individualism destroys the social bond. Although he conceded the point to a certain extent, he was also impressed by the way in which individualistic Americans joined together to form associations, linking their particular interests to the general interest and ultimately creating a society with sovereignty of the people. In contrast to Bonald (who argued that democratic republics are not “constituted”) and de Maistre (who held that a democratic republic is a society without sovereignty and therefore without solidity), Tocqueville thus recognized that society could be constituted in new ways: associations linking public and private, forms of life created by decentralization, avowed or implicit religions, and so forth. But he aimed his criticism primarily at an idea that de Maistre had made famous: “the generative principle (principe générateur) of political constitutions.”

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