Visible Histories Disappearing Women

DIVArgues that the discursive erasure of Muslim women within colonial and Hindu nationalist discourse underpinned the construction of other identity categories in late colonial Bengal and remains linked to violence against Indian Muslim women today./div

In Visible Histories, Disappearing Women, Mahua Sarkar examines how Muslim women in colonial Bengal came to be more marginalized than Hindu women in nationalist discourse and subsequent historical accounts. She also considers how their near-invisibility except as victims has underpinned the construction of the ideal citizen-subject in late colonial India. Through critical engagements with significant feminist and postcolonial scholarship, Sarkar maps out when and where Muslim women enter into the written history of colonial Bengal. She argues that the nation-centeredness of history as a discipline and the intellectual politics of liberal feminism have together contributed to the production of Muslim women as the oppressed, mute, and invisible “other” of the normative modern Indian subject. Drawing on extensive archival research and oral histories of Muslim women who lived in Calcutta and Dhaka in the first half of the twentieth century, Sarkar traces Muslim women as they surface and disappear in colonial, Hindu nationalist, and liberal Muslim writings, as well as in the memories of Muslim women themselves. The oral accounts provide both a rich source of information about the social fabric of urban Bengal during the final years of colonial rule and a glimpse of the kind of negotiations with stereotypes that even relatively privileged, middle-class Muslim women are still frequently obliged to make in India today. Sarkar concludes with some reflections on the complex links between past constructions of Muslim women, current representations, and the violence against them in contemporary India.

In The Hindu Self and its Muslim Neighbors, the author sketches the contours of relations between Hindus and Muslims in Bengal. The central argument is that various patterns of amicability and antipathy have been generated towards Muslims over the last six hundred years and these patterns emerge at dynamic intersections between Hindu self-understandings and social shifts on contested landscapes. The core of the book is a set of translations of the Bengali writings of Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941), Kazi Nazrul Islam (1899–1976), and Annada Shankar Ray (1904–2002). Their lives were deeply interwoven with some Hindu–Muslim synthetic ideas and subjectivities, and these involvements are articulated throughout their writings which provide multiple vignettes of contemporary modes of amity and antagonism. Barua argues that the characterization of relations between Hindus and Muslims either in terms of an implacable hostility or of an unfragmented peace is historically inaccurate, for these relations were modulated by a shifting array of socio-economic and socio-political parameters. It is within these contexts that Rabindranath, Nazrul, and Annada Shankar are developing their thoughts on Hindus and Muslims through the prisms of religious humanism and universalism.

Women, Gender and History in India examines Indian history through a thematic lens of women and gender across different contexts. Through an inter-disciplinary approach, Nita Kumar uses sources from literature, folklore, religion, and art to discuss historical and anthropological ways of interpreting the issues surrounding women and gender in history. As part of the scholarly movement away from a Grand Narrative of South Asian history and culture, this volume places emphasis on the diversity of women and their experiences. It does this by including analyses of many different primary sources together with discussion around a wide variety of theoretical and methodological debates – from the mixed role of colonial law and education to the conundrum of a patriarchy that worships the Goddess while it strives to keep women in subservience. This textbook is essential reading for those studying Indian history and women and gender studies.

The Routledge Handbook of the History of Colonialism in South Asia provides a comprehensive overview of the historiographical specialisation and sophistication of the history of colonialism in South Asia. It explores the classic works of earlier generations of historians and offers an introduction to the rapid and multifaceted development of historical research on colonial South Asia since the 1990s. Covering economic history, political history, and social history and offering insights from other disciplines and ‘turns’ within the mainstream of history, the handbook is structured in six parts: Overarching Themes and Debates The World of Economy and Labour Creating and Keeping Order: Science, Race, Religion, Law, and Education Environment and Space Culture, Media, and the Everyday Colonial South Asia in the World The editors have assembled a group of leading international scholars of South Asian history and related disciplines to introduce a broad readership into the respective subfields and research topics. Designed to serve as a comprehensive and nuanced yet readable introduction to the vast field of the history of colonialism in the Indian subcontinent, the handbook will be of interest to researchers and students in the fields of South Asian history, imperial and colonial history, and global and world history.

The writing of history in India has been fraught with controversies. From the storm over textbooks in the 1970s, and the furore over the Babri Masjid in the 1990s, to the flaring up of religious sentiments over 'beef-eating' and the Ram Sethu, this book provides a synoptic view of teaching and writing of history in post-colonial India. Michael Gottlob explores historical research and teaching as important components contributing to the development of a national identity and ideas of citizenship in post-colonial India. He shows how the urge to decolonize and recover the self has given rise to several approaches that attempt to 'reclaim' Indian history from its colonial past. The book discusses diverse areas like methodological research and public use of history; cultural identity and diversity; nationalism and communalism; and social movements and deconstructs their far-reaching implications in contemporary India. It also examines the role of women, Dalits, and Adivasis to understand their position in the multicultural reality of India.

With evidence from the oral histories of various sections and a wide variety of written sources and historical documents, this book captures an intense moment in the history of the state of Hyderabad and the production its own tools of cultural renaissance and modernity.

1) This is one of the first systematic historical account of Medical Advice about Breastfeeding in Colonial Calcutta. 2) It has rich archival sources like rare medical handbooks and periodicals, governmental proceedings, child welfare exhibition and conference reports, personal papers, memoirs, illustrations and advertisements. 3) This book will be of interest to departments of social history and colonial history across UK.

In Religion and Women in India, Tanika Sarkar provides an account of gender prescriptions and proscriptions and their operation among various Indian religious communities, beginning with early British rule and concluding in the late twentieth century. Tracking various shifts and displacements in doctrinal thought and practice, she argues that Indian modernity was initiated largely through debates on gender, scripture, custom, and caste, which shaped ideal forms of masculine and feminine conduct. She demonstrates the organization of a modern public sphere around the controversies, cultural imaginaries, and political agitations over such issues as the age of consent, child marriage, widow remarriage, rape laws, and intercaste and interfaith relations. Gender norms are shown leaching into social attitudes, labor processes, and legal rights—leading eventually to modern Indian feminism. Closely analyzing the interpenetration and co-constitution of religion, politics, and gender in India, while also comparing parallel developments in Pakistan and Bangladesh, this pioneering work offers a brilliant and synthesizing account of the battles between orthodoxy and its opponents over two hundred years. No historian, no feminist, no student of politics can afford to miss it.

Periodicals, Readers and the Making of a Modern Literary Culture is a study of literary periodicals and the Bengali public sphere at the turn of the twentieth century, the variety of interests and concerns that animated this domain and how literary relations were seen to constitute new social solidarities.