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.

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.

Words of Her Own

Words of Her Own
Author: Maroona Murmu
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 314
Release: 2019-11-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 0199098212

Words of Her Own situates the experiences and articulations of emergent women writers in nineteenth-century Bengal through an exploration of works authored by them. Based on a spectrum of genres—such as autobiographies, novels, and travelogues—this book examines the sociocultural incentives that enabled the dawn of middle-class Hindu and Brahmo women authors at that time. Murmu explores the intersections of class, caste, gender, language, and religion in these works. Reading these texts within a specific milieu, Murmu sets out to rectify the essentialist conception of women’s writings being a monolithic body of works that displays a firmly gendered form and content, by offering rich insights into the complex world of subjectivities of women in colonial Bengal. In attempting to do so, this book opens up the possibility of reconfiguring mainstream history by questioning the scholarly conceptualization of patriarchy being omnipotent enough to shape the intricacies of gender relations, resulting in the flattening of self-fashioning by women writers. The book contends that there were women authors who flouted the norms of literary aesthetics and tastes set by male literati, thereby creating a literary tradition of their own in Bangla and becoming agents of history at the turn of the century.

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.

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

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.

The Politics of Belonging in India

The Politics of Belonging in India
Author: Daniel J. Rycroft
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2011-03-29
Genre: History
ISBN: 1136791159

Since the 1990s, the Indigenous movement worldwide has become increasingly relevant to research in India, re-shaping the terms of engagement with Adivasi (Indigenous/tribal) peoples and their pasts. This book responds to the growing need for an inter-disciplinary re-assessment of Tribal studies in postcolonial India and defines a new agenda for Adivasi studies. It considers the existing conceptual and historical parameters of Tribal studies, as a means of addressing new approaches to histories of de-colonization and patterns of identity-formation that have become visible since national independence. Contributors address a number of important concerns, including the meaning of Indigenous studies in the context of globalised academic and political imaginaries, and the possibilities and pitfalls of constructions of indigeneity as both a foundational and a relational concept. A series of short editorial essays provide theoretical clarity to issues of representation, resistance, agency, recognition and marginality. The book is an essential read for students and scholars of Indian Sociology, Anthropology, History, Cultural Studies and Indigenous studies.

Women Saints Lives in Old English Prose

Women Saints Lives in Old English Prose
Author: Leslie A. Donovan
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd
Total Pages: 160
Release: 1999
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780859915687

Translations of eight saints' lives, giving an insight into women's religious culture in Anglo-Saxon England. Devout, virtuous and independent, the heroines of Old English saints' lives (one of the most popular literary genres of the middle ages) provided exemplars of personal and public inspiration for medieval Christians. The eight lives translated here are the earliest known vernacular accounts of the biographies of Æthelthryth, Agatha, Agnes, Cecilia, Eugenia, Euphrosyne, Lucy, and Mary of Egypt. They depict women escaping unwanted marriages, communicating with male relatives, acquiring an education, living autonomously as hermits, and achieving positions of leadership; such lives document not only the importance of spiritual faith to early Christian women, but also testify to how these women (and their audience) employed faith as a tool for empowerment. Each life is preceded by a brief description of the saint's cult from its early Christian origins to its presence in Anglo-Saxon culture. The translationis accompanied by an introduction establishing the general background for the genre, the conventions of women saints' lives, and women's religious culture in Anglo-Saxon England; and an interpretive essay exploring the relationships between explicit presentations of the female body and the strength of spiritual authority as exhibited in these texts completes the volume. LESLIE A. DONOVAN is Associate Professor at the University of New Mexico.