Women and Agency in Bankim’s Rajmohan’s Wife and Tagore’s The Home and The World

Author(s):  
Manju Dhariwal ◽  

Written almost half a century apart, Rajmohan’s Wife (1864) and The Home and the World (1916) can be read as women centric texts written in colonial India. The plot of both the texts is set in Bengal, the cultural and political centre of colonial India. Rajmohan’s Wife, arguably the first Indian English novel, is one of the first novels to realistically represent ‘Woman’ in the nineteenth century. Set in a newly emerging society of India, it provides an insight into the status of women, their susceptibility and dependence on men. The Home and the World, written at the height of Swadeshi movement in Bengal, presents its woman protagonist in a much progressive space. The paper closely examines these two texts and argues that women enact their agency in relational spaces which leads to the process of their ‘becoming’. The paper analyses this journey of the progress of the self, which starts with Matangini and culminates in Bimala. The paper concludes that women’s journey to emancipation is symbolic of the journey of the nation to independence.

Geoffrey Cantor, Michael Faraday. Sandeminian and scientist. A study o f science and religion in the nineteenth century . Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1991. Pp. xi + 359. ISBN 0-333-55077-3. John Meurig Thomas, Michael Faraday and the Royal Institution. The genius of man and place . Bristol, Philadelphia and London: Adam Hilger, 1991. Pp. xii + 234. ISBN 0-7503-0145-7. The correspondence of Michael Faraday. Volume 1 , 1811-1831, edited by Frank A.J.L. James. London: Institution of Electrical Engineers, 1991. Pp. xlix + 673. ISBN 0-86341-248-3. ‘Very ordinary background, father ran a smithy, son had virtually no education ... didn’t go to university ... But extraordinary - brilliant. The Good Lord’s no respecter of backgrounds, never has been, He plants genius the world over and it’s up to us to find it’.1 Spoken neither by a scientist nor by a historian, these were the words by which Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher elevated Faraday to the status of personal hero in 1987. Behind the rhetoric stood the conviction of 1980s Thatcherism, idealizing as it did the cult of the self-made, and challenging the very survival of those weighty institutions of education and science, most notably the universities, which had apparently played no part in the life and work of such great individuals as Michael Faraday and their entrepreneurial counterparts of the Thatcher years.


2017 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-41 ◽  
Author(s):  
P. R. Bhabad

Fictional medium is really very useful to know reality of society. Literature and visual art used realistically to depict several methods in which perfect description of feminism is the aim. The novel is depiction of day to day life, custom and the woman is portrayed as the key figure of Indian families and at the same time, she has been projected as the subject of suffering domestic slavery and suppression. Native feminism in India is not as aggressive as feminism in the West. Patriarchy is another name of native feminism reflected in the novels; through self-realization, it is expected that the woman can emerge as a new woman. The social realist writers have been very much interested in recording social changes and the status of women. Industrialization, urbanization and globalization have brought considerable changes in social life and status of women in India. Position of educated women is quite better than illiterate but gender discrimination still persists. To face all hurdles of their life the next generation women very boldly and intelligently achieve their aims to get their identity.


2007 ◽  
Vol 35 (103) ◽  
pp. 108-137
Author(s):  
Carsten Sestoft

Romanens status i det 17. århundredes Frankrig The hesitations of a genre: The status of the novel in seventeenth-century FranceIn answering the question: What was the novel in seventeenth-century France? – this article provides insight into some important points of the early history of the genre. The contradiction between its non-existence in official (Aristotelian) poetics and its existence as a popular commodity on the book market was, in the course of the seventeenth century, reconciled in the emergent category of belles lettres as a plurality of genres mainly defined by their public of honnêtes gens, while attempts at legitimizing the novel as belonging to such Aristotelian genres as epic or history generally failed; and at the end of the century a number of convergences – between epic and novel, between the designations roman and nouvelle, and between the ‘high’ and ‘low’ forms of the novel – seem to point to the fact that the social existence of the genre had been strengthened, even if it was the English novel of the eighteenth century that could be said to reap the profits of this stronger position. Using historical semantics and cultural sociology to study the status of the novel in seventeenth-century France thus leads to a clearer understanding of the specificity of the novel as a literary and cultural genre.


Adam alemi ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (86) ◽  
pp. 104-113
Author(s):  
K. Bagasharov ◽  
R. Shaikenova ◽  
G. Tabashev ◽  
N. Tutinova

The relevance of this study is related to the status of women in society in the pre-Islamic periiod. The introduction discusses the relevance of the work. This topic has been relevant since past times, and to this day it is just as relevant not only in individual regions, but throughout the world. Before writing the main part, a brief comparative analysis of the rights and position of women in ancient civilizations such as the Greek civilization, the kingdom of mana (Hinduism), Judaism and the Arab countries before the Islamic period was made. The main part was devoted to the consideration of women’s rights in marriage and family relations. In various social classes, the degree of women was low. The main goal is to reveal and not recognize the rights of women in society, marriage and family. In the pre-Islamic period, women had no rights in Arab society. In the period of ignorance of the Arabs, girls were buried alive. Islam also shows that women are also human and have the same rights as men. After analyzing the pre-Islamic period, in the final part, examples were given of immorality and ignorance towards a woman, and with the advent of true religions, all these actions were canceled, and the status of a woman was elevated.


2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Humera Sultana ◽  
Nasreen Aslam Shah

Historically, the status of women was very low all over the world however Islam is the only religion which help in changing the status of women and improve her status in the society. This paper explores the lives of Muslim women in the period of early Islamic society which reveals that these women gave the lesson of virtue, piety, devotion and sacrifice to every women and daughter of Islam. These ladies bore exemplary moral character, and in performance of their responsibilities they sacrificed their luxuries, comforts and happiness. Following footprints of these ladies can make every daughter a proud human being.


2014 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 370-398 ◽  
Author(s):  
RADHIKA GUPTA

AbstractShi‘i scholars from India have been a sizeable presence in seminaries in Iran and Iraq, both historically and today. Yet there is a dearth of scholarship on Shi‘i linkages between India and West Asia, with the exception of historical work on the patronage of shrine cities in Iraq by centres of Shi‘ism in India. Departing from this geographical and historical focus, this paper lends insight into contemporary religious networks between India and West Asia, using the example of the Twelver Shi‘a in Kargil, a region located on India's ‘border’ with Pakistan in the province of Kashmir. Kargili scholars travelled overland via Afghanistan or by sea from Bombay to Basra to study in seminaries in Iraq and Iran from the nineteenth century onwards. Increasing fluency in Urdu in post-colonial India enabled them to connect with Shi‘i institutions in other parts of India, which mediate religious, cultural, and financial flows from a transnational Shi‘ite realm. These networks ofreligiouslearning are not only conduits for the transmission of textual, doctrinal knowledge, but also for politico-religious ideologies that are selectively harnessed, and often exaggerated, to effect significant social and political changes in micro-locales. While local conflicts are over-determined by the evocation of transnational links, they also reflect, even if only through rhetorical and partial reproduction, doctrinal and politico-religious schisms among Shi‘i leaders in West Asia. This is illustrated by an ethnographic account of the activities undertaken and contestations provoked by the Imam Khomeini Memorial Trust in Kargil, a modernist reform movement that has selectively appropriated Khomeini's revolutionary ideologies to instigate social change and shape local politics and religious practice in Kargil.


Author(s):  
Carey K. Morewedge ◽  
Daniella M. Kupor

Intuitions, attitudes, images, mind-wandering, dreams, and religious messages are just a few of the many kinds of uncontrolled thoughts that intrude on consciousness spontaneously without a clear reason. Logic suggests that people might thus interpret spontaneous thoughts as meaningless and be uninfluenced by them. By contrast, our survey of this literature indicates that the lack of an obvious external source or motive leads people to attribute considerable meaning and importance to spontaneous thoughts. Spontaneous thoughts are perceived to provide meaningful insight into the self, others, and the world. As a result of these metacognitive appraisals, spontaneous thoughts substantially affect the beliefs, attitudes, decisions, and behavior of the thinker. We present illustrative examples of the metacognitive appraisals by which people attribute meaning to spontaneous secular and religious thoughts, and the influence of these thoughts on judgment and decision-making, attitude formation and change, dream interpretation, and prayer discernment.


PMLA ◽  
1954 ◽  
Vol 69 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-98
Author(s):  
Morton Cronin

The women that Hawthorne created divide rather neatly into three groups. Such fragile creatures as Alice Pyncheon and Priscilla, who are easily dominated by other personalities, form one of these groups. Another is made up of bright, self-reliant, and wholesome girls, such as Ellen Langton, Phoebe, and Hilda. The third consists of women whose beauty, intellect, and strength of will raise them to heroic proportions and make them fit subjects for tragedy. Hester Prynne, Zenobia, and Miriam—these women are capable of tilting with the world and risking their souls on the outcome. With them in particular Hawthorne raises and answers the question of the proper status of women in society and the relation, whether subordinate or superior, that love should bear to the other demands that life makes upon the individual. With the other types Hawthorne fills out his response to that question.


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