Coming of Age in Nineteenth-Century India
Coming of Age in Nineteenth-Century India

Author: Ruby Lal

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2013-02-18

Total Pages: 249

ISBN-13: 1139852019

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In this engaging and eloquent history, Ruby Lal traces the becoming of nineteenth-century Indian women through a critique of narratives of linear transition from girlhood to womanhood. In the north Indian patriarchal environment, women's lives were dominated by the expectations of the male universal, articulated most clearly in household chores and domestic duties. The author argues that girls and women in the early nineteenth century experienced freedoms, eroticism, adventurousness and playfulness, even within restrictive circumstances. Although women in the colonial world of the later nineteenth century remained agential figures, their activities came to be constrained by more firmly entrenched domestic norms. Lal skillfully marks the subtle and complex alterations in the multifaceted female subject in a variety of nineteenth-century discourses, elaborated in four different sites - forest, school, household, and rooftops.

The Mughals and the Sufis
The Mughals and the Sufis

Author: Muzaffar Alam

Publisher: State University of New York Press

Published: 2021-08-01

Total Pages: 458

ISBN-13: 1438484909

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Based on a critical study of a large number of contemporary Persian texts, court chronicles, epistolary collections, and biographies of sufi mystics, The Mughals and the Sufis examines the complexities in the relationship between Mughal political culture and the two dominant strains of Islam's Sufi traditions in South Asia: one centered around orthodoxy, the other focusing on a more accommodating and mystical spirituality. Muzaffar Alam analyses the interplay of these elements, their negotiation and struggle for resolution via conflict and coordination, and their longer-term outcomes as the empire followed its own political and cultural trajectory as it shifted from the more liberal outlook of Emperor Akbar "The Great" (r. 1556–1605) to the more rigid attitudes of his great-grandson, Aurangzeb 'Alamgir (r. 1658–1701). Alam brings to light many new and underutilized sources relevant to the religious and cultural history of the Mughals and reinterprets well-known sources from a new perspective to provide one of the most detailed and nuanced portraits of Indian Islam under the Mughal Empire available today.

Dust of the Caravan
Dust of the Caravan

Author: Anis Kidwai

Publisher: Zubaan

Published: 2021-08-31

Total Pages: 298

ISBN-13: 8194760577

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Dust of the Caravan is a selection of writings by Anis Kidwai sketching the personal and political journey of a Muslim woman through the first eight decades of the 20th century. In Kidwai’s often humorous and always incisive and compassionate telling of the travels that took her from a birth and upbringing in rural Awadh into the maelstrom of Partition and its aftermath, lies a rich tapestry of tales. Simultaneously a social history of life in rural Awadh in the early 20th century and the birth of the national movement in the region as well as an account of the traditions of mutual respect and understanding between different faiths in a shared culture and the rupture of those very traditions during Partition, this book is also the story of a woman’s journey from the home into the world and from ‘family values’ towards autonomous beliefs, friendships, and activism. In addition to its value as a literary work, Dust of the Caravan is an important resource in the fields of history, sociology, and gender studies.

Accessions List, South Asia
Accessions List, South Asia

Author: Library of Congress. Library of Congress Office, New Delhi

Publisher:

Published: 1989-07

Total Pages: 1208

ISBN-13:

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Records publications acquired from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka, by the U.S. Library of Congress Offices in New Delhi, India, and Karachi, Pakistan.

Muslims in Indian Economy
Muslims in Indian Economy

Author: Omar Khalidi

Publisher:

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13:

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The 130 million Muslims in India form the second largest Muslim population in the world. Scholarship on them has however focused on a limited range of issues. There is little by way of macro studies on the economic condition of Muslims in various parts of India. What is the condition of the Indian Muslims at the dawn of the twenty first century? What is the demographic profile of the community? What is the percentage of its population in agriculture, industry and the tertiary sector? How do Muslims fare at the national level? Does the Muslim economic condition differ from state to state, given the regional imbalances in the country resulting from unequal develop-ment? How does Muslim economic condition in the early twenty first century compare with the recent and distant past? To what extent can the political changes account for these varia-tions? How does the economic profile of the Muslims compare with the majority Hindus, Dalits, and minorities like Christians, Sikhs and Parsis? Historians, politicians, journalists and others agree that Muslims in general lag behind other communities. Does Islam, or Islam as interpreted and lived, have anything to do with it? What is the role of the State in this matter? What is the record of the post-independence central and state governments? The author tries to answer some of these questions. He argues that understanding these issues is not only a matter of academic enquiry, but also necessary for taking appropriate corrective measures by the community leader-ship as well as by the state. The various chapters focus on the pre-Independence legacy, the impact on Muslims of Partition and politics on ownership of assets, employment, access to education, public services or their role in labour, commerce and industry. It is a report on the current status of the Muslim minority in India, particularly the Urdu-speaking Muslims. Densely documented, with hard to find statistical data, written with an economy of words, no one remotely interested in Indian economy, society or politics can afford to ignore this immensely readable book.