Learning femininity in colonial India, 1820–1932

Learning femininity in colonial India, 1820–1932
Author: Tim Allender
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Total Pages: 463
Release: 2016-01-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 178499636X

This book explores the colonial mentalities that shaped and were shaped by women living in colonial India between 1820 and 1932. Using a broad framework the book examines the many life experiences of these women and how their position changed, both personally and professionally, over this long period of study. Drawing on a rich documentary record from archives in the United Kingdom, India, Pakistan, North America, Ireland and Australia this book builds a clear picture of the colonial-configured changes that influenced women interacting with the colonial state. In the early nineteenth century the role of some women occupying colonial spaces in India was to provide emotional sustenance to expatriate European males serving away from the moral strictures of Britain. However, powerful colonial statecraft intervened in the middle of the century to racialise these women and give them a new official, moral purpose. Only some females could be teachers, chosen by their race as reliable transmitters of genteel accomplishment codes of European, middle-class femininity. Yet colonial female activism also had impact when pressing against these revised, official gender constructions. New geographies of female medical care outreach emerged. Roman Catholic teaching orders, whose activism was sponsored by piety, sought out other female colonial peripheries, some of which the state was then forced to accommodate. Ultimately the national movement built its own gender thresholds of interchange, ignoring the unproductive colonial learning models for females, infected as these models had become with the broader race, class and gender agendas of a fading raj. This book will appeal to students and academics working on the history of empire and imperialism, gender studies, postcolonial studies and the history of education.

Empire, Civil Society, and the Beginnings of Colonial Education in India

Empire, Civil Society, and the Beginnings of Colonial Education in India
Author:
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 392
Release: 2019-05-23
Genre: History
ISBN: 1108656269

This book tells a story of radical educational change. In the early nineteenth century, an imperial civil society movement promoted modern elementary 'schools for all'. This movement included British, American and German missionaries, and Indian intellectuals and social reformers. They organised themselves in non-governmental organisations, which aimed to change Indian education. Firstly, they introduced a new culture of schooling, centred on memorisation, examination, and technocratic management. Secondly, they laid the ground for the building of the colonial system of education, which substituted indigenous education. Thirdly, they broadened the social accessibility of schooling. However, for the nineteenth century reformers, education for all did not mean equal education for all: elementary schooling became a means to teach different subalterns 'their place' in colonial society. Finally, the educational movement also furthered the building of a secular 'national education' in England.

Colonial Education in India 1781–1945

Colonial Education in India 1781–1945
Author: Pramod K. Nayar
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 1554
Release: 2022-07-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 135121215X

This 5 volume set tracks the various legal, administrative and social documentation on the progress of Indian education from 1780 to 1947. The documents not only map a cultural history of English education in India, but capture the debates in and around each of these domains through coverage of English (language, literature, pedagogy), the journey from school-to-university, and technical and vocational education. Produced by statesmen, educationists, administrators, teachers, Vice Chancellors and native national leaders, the documents testify to the complex processes through which colleges were set up, syllabi formed, the language of instruction determined, and infrastructure built. The sources vary from official Minutes to orders, petitions to pleas, speeches to opinion pieces. The collection contributes, through the mostly unmediated documents, to our understanding of the British Empire, of the local responses to the Empire and imperial policy and of the complex negotiations within and without the administrative structures that set about establishing the college, the training institute and the teaching profession itself.

Routledge Handbook of the History of Colonialism in South Asia

Routledge Handbook of the History of Colonialism in South Asia
Author: Harald Fischer-Tiné
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 697
Release: 2021-09-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0429774699

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.

‘Femininity’ and the History of Women's Education

‘Femininity’ and the History of Women's Education
Author: Tim Allender
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 249
Release: 2020-12-18
Genre: History
ISBN: 3030542335

This book draws on recent deconstructions around the idea of ‘femininity’ as a social, racial and class construct and explores the diversity of spaces that may be defined as educational that range from institutional contexts to family, to professional outlooks, to racial identity, to defining community and religious groupings. It explores how notions of femininity change across time and place, and within individual lives. Such changes take place at the interface of external forces and individual agency. The application of the notion of ‘femininity’ that assumes a consistent definition of the term is interrogated by the authors, leading to a discussion of the rich possibilities for new directions in research into women’s lives across time, place, and individual life histories.

Colonial Education and India 1781-1945

Colonial Education and India 1781-1945
Author: Pramod K. Nayar
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 418
Release: 2019-09-17
Genre: History
ISBN: 1351212109

This 5-volume set tracks the various legal, administrative and social documentation on the progress of Indian education from 1780 to 1947. This first volume features commentaries, reports, policy documents from the period 1781-1853. The documents not only map a cultural history of English education in India but capture the debates in and around each of these domains through coverage of English (language, literature, pedagogy), the journey from school-to-university, and technical and vocational education. Produced by statesmen, educationists, administrators, teachers, Vice Chancellors and native national leaders, the documents testify to the complex processes through which colleges were set up, syllabi formed, the language of instruction determined, and infrastructure built. The sources vary from official Minutes to orders, petitions to pleas, speeches to opinion pieces. The collection contributes, through the mostly unmediated documents, to our understanding of the British Empire, of the local responses to the Empire and imperial policy and of the complex negotiations within and without the administrative structures that set about establishing the college, the training institute and the teaching profession itself.

Women, Gender and History in India

Women, Gender and History in India
Author: Nita Kumar
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 206
Release: 2023-07-27
Genre: History
ISBN: 1000898202

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.

Education and Modernity in Colonial Punjab

Education and Modernity in Colonial Punjab
Author: Michael Philipp Brunner
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 292
Release: 2020-11-23
Genre: History
ISBN: 3030535142

This book explores the localisation of modernity in late colonial India. As a case study, it focuses on the hitherto untold colonial history of Khalsa College, Amritsar, a pioneering and highly influential educational institution founded in the British Indian province of Punjab in 1892 by the religious minority community of the Sikhs. Addressing topics such as politics, religion, rural development, militarism or physical education, the study shows how Sikh educationalists and activists made use of and ‘localised’ communal, imperial, national and transnational discourses and knowledge. Their modernist visions and schemes transcended both imperialist and mainstream nationalist frameworks and networks. In its quest to educate the modern Sikh – scientific, practical, disciplined and physically fit – the college navigated between very local and global claims, opportunities and contingencies, mirroring modernity’s ambivalent simultaneity of universalism and particularism.

Gendered transactions

Gendered transactions
Author: Indrani Sen
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Total Pages: 237
Release: 2017-03-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1526106019

This book seeks to capture the complex experience of the white woman in colonial India through an exploration of gendered interactions over the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It examines missionary and memsahibs' colonial writings, both literary and non-literary, probing their construction of Indian women of different classes and regions, such as zenana women, peasants, ayahs and wet-nurses. Also examined are delineations of European female health issues in male authored colonial medical handbooks, which underline the misogyny undergirding this discourse. Giving voice to the Indian woman, this book also scrutinises the fiction of the first generation of western-educated Indian women who wrote in English, exploring their construction of white women and their negotiations with colonial modernities. This fascinating book will be of interest to the general reader and to experts and students of gender studies, colonial history, literary and cultural studies as well as the social history of health and medicine.

Empire religiosity

Empire religiosity
Author: Tim Allender
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Total Pages: 211
Release: 2024-07-23
Genre: History
ISBN: 1526159090

This book explores Roman Catholic female missionaries and their placement in colonial and postcolonial India. It offers fascinating insights into their idiomatic activism, juxtaposed with a contrarian Protestant raj and with their own church patriarchies. During the Great Revolt of 1857, these women religious hid in church steeples. They were forced into the medical care of sexually diseased women in Lock Hospitals. They followed the Jesuits to experimental tribal village domains and catered for elites in the airy hilltop stations of the raj. Yet, they could not escape the eugenic and child rescue practices that were the flavour of the imperial day. New geographies of race and gender were also created by their social and educational outreach. This allowed them to remain on the subcontinent after the tide went out on empire in 1947. Their religious bodies remained untouched by India yet their experience in the field built awareness of the complex semiotics and visual traces engaged by the East/West interchange. After 1947, their tropes of social outreach were shaped by their direct interaction with Indians. Many new women religious were now of the same race or carried a strongly anti-British Irish ancestry. In the postcolonial world their historicity continues to underpin their negotiable Western-constructed activism - now reaching trafficked girls and those in modern-day slavery. The uncovered and multi-dimensional contours of their work are strong contributors to the current Black Lives Matter debates and how the etymology and constructs of empire find their way into current NGO philanthropy.