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: 1107030242

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In this eloquent history, Ruby Lal traces the lives of nineteenth-century Indian women in their transition from girlhood to maturity. In the north Indian patriarchal environment, women's lives were dominated by prescriptive household chores and domestic duties. What the book reveals, however, is that women in the early nineteenth century experienced greater freedoms, playfulness, and creativity than their counterparts in the more restricted colonial world at the end of the century.

The Colonial Public and the Parsi Stage
The Colonial Public and the Parsi Stage

Author: Rashna Darius Nicholson

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2021-02-27

Total Pages: 328

ISBN-13: 3030658368

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The Colonial Public and the Parsi Stage is the first comprehensive study of the Parsi theatre, colonial South and Southeast Asia’s most influential cultural phenomenon and the precursor of the Indian cinema industry. By providing extensive, unpublished information on its first actors, audiences, production methods, and plays, this book traces how the theatre—which was one of the first in the Indian subcontinent to adopt European stagecraft—transformed into a pan-Asian entertainment industry in the second half of the nineteenth century. Nicholson sheds light on the motivations that led to the development of the popular, commercial theatre movement in Asia through three areas of investigation: the vernacular public sphere, the emergence of competing visions of nationhood, and the narratological function that women served within a continually shifting socio-political order. The book will be of interest to scholars across several disciplines, including cultural history, gender studies, Victorian studies, the sociology of religion, colonialism, and theatre.

Colonial India in Children's Literature
Colonial India in Children's Literature

Author: Supriya Goswami

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2012-07-26

Total Pages: 216

ISBN-13: 1136281428

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Colonial India in Children’s Literature is the first book-length study to explore the intersections of children’s literature and defining historical moments in colonial India. Engaging with important theoretical and critical literature that deals with colonialism, hegemony, and marginalization in children's literature, Goswami proposes that British, Anglo-Indian, and Bengali children’s literature respond to five key historical events: the missionary debates preceding the Charter Act of 1813, the defeat of Tipu Sultan, the Mutiny of 1857, the birth of Indian nationalism, and the Swadeshi movement resulting from the Partition of Bengal in 1905. Through a study of works by Mary Sherwood (1775-1851), Barbara Hofland (1770-1844), Sara Jeanette Duncan (1861-1922), Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936), Upendrakishore Ray (1863-1915), and Sukumar Ray (1887-1923), Goswami examines how children’s literature negotiates and represents these momentous historical forces that unsettled Britain’s imperial ambitions in India. Goswami argues that nineteenth-century British and Anglo-Indian children’s texts reflect two distinct moods in Britain’s colonial enterprise in India. Sherwood and Hofland (writing before 1857) use the tropes of conversion and captivity as a means of awakening children to the dangers of India, whereas Duncan and Kipling shift the emphasis to martial prowess, adaptability, and empirical knowledge as defining qualities in British and Anglo-Indian children. Furthermore, Goswami’s analysis of early nineteenth-century children’s texts written by women authors redresses the preoccupation with male authors and boys’ adventure stories that have largely informed discussions of juvenility in the context of colonial India. This groundbreaking book also seeks to open up the canon by examining early twentieth-century Bengali children’s texts that not only draw literary inspiration from nineteenth-century British children’s literature, but whose themes are equally shaped by empire.

The Awkward Age in Women's Popular Fiction, 1850-1900
The Awkward Age in Women's Popular Fiction, 1850-1900

Author: Sarah Bilston

Publisher: OUP Oxford

Published: 2004-07-22

Total Pages: 284

ISBN-13: 9780191556760

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This book demonstrates that 'the awkward age' formed a fault-line in Victorian female experience, an unusual phase in which restlessness, self-interest, and rebellion were possible. Tracing evolving treatments of female adolescence though a host of long-forgotten women's fictions, the book reveals that representations of the girl in popular women's literature importantly anticipated depictions of the feminist in the fin de siècle New Woman writing; conservative portrayals of girls' hopes, dreams, and subsequent frustrations helped clear a literary and cultural space for the New Woman's 'awakening' to disaffected consciousness. The book thus both historicises the evolution and mythic appeal of the female adolescent and works to receive suggestive exchanges between apparently diverse female literary traditions.

The Emergence of Feminism in India, 1850-1920
The Emergence of Feminism in India, 1850-1920

Author: Padma Anagol

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-03-02

Total Pages: 454

ISBN-13: 1351890808

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Grounded in a variety of rich and diverse source materials such as periodicals meant for women and edited by women, song and cookbooks, book reviews and court records, the author of this pioneering study mobilises claims for the existence of an Indian feminism in the nineteenth century. Anagol traces the ways in which Indian women engaged with the power structures-both colonialist and patriarchical-which sought to define them. Through her analysis of Indian male reactions to movements of assertion by women, Anagol shows that the development of feminist consciousness in India from the late nineteenth century to the coming of Gandhi was not one of uninterrupted unilinear progression. The book illustrates the ways in which such movements were based upon a consciousness of the inequalities in gender relations and highlights the determination of an emerging female intelligentsia to remedy it. The author's innovative study of women and crime challenges the notion of passivity by uncovering instances of individual resistance in the domestic sphere. Her study of women's perspectives and participation in the Age of Consent Bill debates clearly demonstrates how the rebellion of wives and their assertion in the colonial courts had resulted in male reaction to reform rather than the current historiographical claims that it was a response purely to threats posed by 'colonial masculinity'. Anagol's investigation of the growth of the women's press, their writings and participation in the wider vernacular press highlights the relationship between symbolic or 'hidden' resistance and open assertion by women.

Age Of Pandemics (1817-1920)
Age Of Pandemics (1817-1920)

Author: Chinmay Tumbe

Publisher: Harper Collins

Published: 2020-12-02

Total Pages: 284

ISBN-13: 9353579465

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From lockdowns to lockups, viruses to vaccination, the movement of people to the movement of bowels, from rats to cats, and more, The Age of Pandemics chronicles the many facets of the cholera, plague and influenza pandemics, which claimed over 70 million lives between 1817 and 1920, with India being the epicentre in all these episodes. The book argues that the period between the early nineteenth century to the early twentieth century - an age otherwise known for the worldwide spread of the industrial revolution, imperialism and globalization - was also the 'age of pandemics'. It documents the scale of devastation, the likely causes and consequences, and the resilience with which people faced those pandemics. The book also provides the first comprehensive coverage of the world's greatest demographic disaster ever to descend upon a country in a short period of time - the influenza pandemic in India in 1918, which claimed more lives than all the battle casualties of World War I. And it shows the continuing relevance of learning from those times to tackle contemporary challenges, such as COVID-19.