Rebels, Wives, Saints

Rebels, Wives, Saints
Author: Tanika Sarkar
Publisher:
Total Pages: 374
Release: 2009
Genre: Family & Relationships
ISBN:

In Rebels, Wives, Saints, acclaimed scholar Tanika Sarkar continues her revolutionary scholarship on women, religion, and nationhood in colonial Bengal. The colonial universe Sarkar describes in Rebels, Wives, Saints centers around symbols of women as both defiled and deified, exemplified in the idea of woman as widow and woman as goddess. The nation, Sarkar explains, is imagined as a woman-goddess within a country comprising plural cultural traditions. Sarkar also broadens the discussion to consider male reformers who battle Hindu conservatives, a Hindu novelist who idealizes nationalism as a means for overcoming Muslim influence, male-dominant social norms, and theatre and censorship. Throughout the book, Sarkar deploys her trademark focus on small, specific, emotional defining moments in order to arrive at a larger, compelling picture that reveals how people actually feel and experience life in Bengal.

Guru to the World

Guru to the World
Author: Ruth Harris
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 561
Release: 2022-10-18
Genre: History
ISBN: 0674247477

Guru to the World tells the story of Swami Vivekananda, the nineteenth-century Hindu ascetic who introduced the West to yoga and to a tolerant, scientifically minded universalist conception of religion. Ruth Harris explores the many legacies of Vivekananda’s thought, including his impact on anticolonial movements and contemporary Hindu nationalism.

The Doctor and Mrs. A.

The Doctor and Mrs. A.
Author: Sarah Pinto
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Total Pages: 313
Release: 2019-11-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 0823286681

Just before India’s independence, a young Punjabi woman, ill at ease in her marriage and eager for personal and national freedom, sat down with psychiatrist Dev Satya Nand for an experiment in his new method of dream analysis. The published analysis documents a surge of emotion and reflections on sexuality, gender, marriage, ambition, trauma, and art. “Mrs. A.” (as she is known) turned to female figures from Hindu myth to reimagine her social world and its ethical arrangements, envisioning a future beyond marriage, colonial rule, and gendered constraints. This book explores the conversation between Mrs. A. and Satya Nand, its window onto gender and sexuality in late colonial Indian society, and the ways Mrs. A. put ethics in motion, creating alternatives to ideals of belonging, recognition, and consciousness. It finds in Mrs. A.’s musings repertoires for the creative transformation of ideals and explores the possibilities of thinking with a dynamic concept of counter-ethics. An unconventional history of gender and sexuality in late colonialism, this book reminds us that the west did not invent feminism, that psychiatry’s history of innovation and creativity is global, and that ethical thinking does not need to center on western myths or paradigms.

Citizens of Everywhere

Citizens of Everywhere
Author: Rosalind Parr
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages:
Release: 2021-10-31
Genre: History
ISBN: 1009032410

Citizens of Everywhere traces the international careers of a cohort of extraordinary Indian women leaders during the final decades of colonial rule. Working in pursuit of the dual goals of Indian independence and women's rights, the women featured in this book established productive transnational connections to gain influence on the world stage, all against the backdrop of momentous events in India and beyond. In doing so, they contributed a distinct set of ideas to global conversations about rights and citizenship. By bringing this transnational activism to light, the author offers new perspectives on Indian nationalism. More broadly the book establishes Indian women as actors in the global histories of women's rights and international movements during the era of decolonisation.

Much Ado Over Coffee

Much Ado Over Coffee
Author: Bhaswati Bhattacharya
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 528
Release: 2017-08-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 1351383159

Based on oral history, fiction, fascinating intellectual gossip, and records of the Coffee Board of India, this study is a multi-sited ethnography of the Indian Coffee House, possibly the world’s first coffee house chain. It offers a critical analysis of adda (informal meetings) of the educated middle class in Allahabad, Calcutta and Delhi. The coffee house became the new socio-intellectual nerve centre, replacing the neigbourhood tea shops, and creating an entirely different social space. This book will have line drawings and cartoons as well as archival photographs.

Hindu Nationalism in India

Hindu Nationalism in India
Author: Tanika Sarkar
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 266
Release: 2022-05-01
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0197654223

In the twenty-first century, there has been a seismic shift in Indian political, religious and social life. The country's guiding spirit was formerly a fusion of the anti-caste worldview of B.R. Ambedkar; the inclusive Hinduism of Mahatma Gandhi; and the agnostic secularism of Jawaharlal Nehru. Today, that fusion has given way to Hindutva. This now-dominant version of Hinduism blends the militant nationalism of V.D. Savarkar; the Brahmanical anti-minorityism of M.S. Golwalkar; and the global Islamophobia of India's ruling regime. It requires deep cultural analysis and historical understanding, as only the sharpest and most profoundly informed historian can provide. For two decades, Tanika Sarkar has forged a path through the alleys and byways of Hindutva. She has trawled through the writing and iconography of its organisations and institutions, including RSS schools and VHP temples. She has visited the offices and homes of Hindutva's votaries, interviewing men and women who believe fervently in their mission of Hinduising India. And she has contextualised this new ferment on the ground with her formidable archival knowledge of Hindutva's origins and development over 150 years, from Bankimchandra to the Babri mosque and beyond. This riveting book connects Hindu religious nationalism with the cultural politics of everyday India.

Religion and Women in India

Religion and Women in India
Author: Tanika Sarkar
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Total Pages: 264
Release: 2024-08-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN:

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.

Women Speak Nation

Women Speak Nation
Author: Panchali Ray
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 351
Release: 2019-07-24
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1000507270

Women Speak Nation underlines the centrality of gender within the ideological construction of nationalism. The volume locates itself in a rich scholarship of feminist critique of the relationship between political, economic, cultural, and social formations and normative gendered relations to try and understand the cross-currents in contemporary feminist theorizing and politics. The chapters question the gendered depictions of the nation as Hindu, upper caste, middle class, heterosexual, able-bodied Indian mother. The volume also brings together interviews and short essays from practitioners and activists who voice an alternative reimagining of the nation. The book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of gender, politics, modern South Asian history, and cultural studies.

Calcutta

Calcutta
Author: Tanika Sarkar
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 487
Release: 2017-07-14
Genre: History
ISBN: 1351581724

The period (1940s to 1950s), was chaotic and turbulent in Calcutta, yet, this was also a time of significant creativity in literature, art, films and music in the city. The originality of the work lies in blending poetry with historical writing, retaining the essence of both forms against the backdrop of the tumultuous events of the critical decades. This historical method together with twenty-one papers give the reader a sense of the pulse of this complex city ‘emerging creatively and chaotically from its colonial past’. Please note: Taylor & Francis does not sell or distribute the Hardback in India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka

Our Pictures, Our Words

Our Pictures, Our Words
Author: Laxmi Murthy
Publisher: Zubaan
Total Pages: 228
Release: 2014-10-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9381017492

Vibrant, dynamic, spirited and forceful. The contemporary women’s movement in India, which began in the late 1970s protested against the dark times, the violence and the misogyny. It also colourfully celebrated liberation, solidarity among women and breaking the shackles of patriarchy. It sang, performed and painted, to draw attention to the burning issues of the time: dowry death, widow immolation, acid throwing and rape. Over the past three decades, the women’s movement has matured and broadened to include a gamut of issues related to women’s health, sexuality, the environment, literacy, the impact of religion and communalism on women’s lives, political participation, labour rights, disability rights, class and caste issues, and many more. Indeed, feminism meant looking at the world through women’s eyes. This book constructs a pictorial history of the complex and multi-layered women’s movement through its visual representation: posters, drawings, pamphlets, reports, brochures, stickers, wall-writing and photographs. The posters reproduced here are part of Zubaan’s Poster Women project, which has attempted to locate and archive as many posters of the movement as possible to be able to visually map the women’s movement and its concerns. The Poster Women archive can be accessed at www.posterwomen.org. Published by Zubaan.