Sati, the Blessing and the Curse

Sati, the Blessing and the Curse

Author: John Stratton Hawley

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 1994

Total Pages: 229

ISBN-13: 0195077741

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Sati symbolizes ultimate loyalty and self-sacrifice. It often figures near the core of a Hindu identity that feels embattled in a modern world. Yet to those who deplore it, sati is a curse, a violation of every woman's womanhood.


New Critical Writings in Political Sociology

New Critical Writings in Political Sociology

Author: Alan Scott

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-11-01

Total Pages: 606

ISBN-13: 1040293174

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The articles collected together in this volume are concerned with why and how people get involved in politics, whether through formal mechanisms such as voting, through some of the more informal means and settings of social movement networks and political protest, or through engagement in public debate. But just as important is the question of why people do not get involved in politics. What social conditions, ideas and values facilitate or discourage political activity? How is it that some people are systematically disempowered in democratic societies in comparison with others? What social forms offer the most promise for extending and deepening democracy? This volume brings togther the most seminal papers, which together form a record of how political sociologists since the 1970s have framed questions about the range and limits of democratic political engagement and developed concepts and methodologies in order to research the answers to those questions.


Martyrdom, Self-sacrifice, and Self-immolation

Martyrdom, Self-sacrifice, and Self-immolation

Author: Margo Kitts

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2018

Total Pages: 361

ISBN-13: 0190656484

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Suicide in the forms of martyrdom, self-sacrifice, or self-immolation is perennially controversial: Should it rightly be termed suicide? Does religion sanction it? Should it be celebrated or anathematized? At least some idealization of such self-chosen deaths is found in every religious tradition treated in this volume, from ascetic heroes who conquer their passions to save others by dying, to righteous warriors who suffer and die valiantly while challenging the status quo. At the same time, there are persistent disputes about the concepts used to justify these deaths, such as altruism, heroism, and religion itself. In this volume, renowned scholars bring their literary and historical expertise to bear on the contested issue of religiously sanctioned suicide. Three examine contemporary movements with disputed classical roots, while eleven look at classical religious literatures which variously laud and disparage figures who invite self-harm to the point of death. Overall, the volume offers an important scholarly corrective to the axiom that religious traditions simply and always embrace life at any cost.


Widows Under Hindu Law

Widows Under Hindu Law

Author: David J. Brick

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2023

Total Pages: 329

ISBN-13: 0197664547

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During British colonial rule in India, the treatment of high-caste Hindu widows became the subject of great controversy. Such women were not permitted to remarry and were offered two options: a life of seclusion and rigorous asceticism or death on the funeral pyre of a deceased husband. Was this a modern development, or did it date from the classical period? In this book, David Brick offers an exhaustive history of the treatment and status of widows under classical Hindu law, or Dharmasastra as it is called in Sanskrit, which spanned approximately the third century BCE to the eighteenth-century CE. Under Dharmasastra, Hindu jurists treated at length and at times hotly debated four widow-related issues: widow remarriage and levirate, a widow's right to inherit her husband's estate, widow-asceticism, and sati. Each of the book's chapters examine these issues in depth, concluding with an appendix that addresses a widow's right to adopt a son-a fifth widow-related issue that became the topic of discussion in late Dharmasastra works and was a significant point of legal contentions during the colonial period. When read critically and historically, works of Dharmasastra provide a long and detailed record of the prevailing legal and social norms of high-caste Hindu society. Widows Under Hindu Law uses lengthy English translations of important passages from Hindu legal texts to present a largescale narrative of the treatment of widows under the Hindu legal tradition. This is an open access title. It is available to read and download as a free PDF version on the Oxford Academic platform. It has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 International licence.


Culture and Self-Harm

Culture and Self-Harm

Author: Dinesh Bhugra

Publisher: Psychology Press

Published: 2020-07-26

Total Pages: 296

ISBN-13: 1000144437

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Attempted suicide is a matter of serious public health concern. Culture and Self-Harm considers the factors that may contribute to this increased rate of self-harm and suicide among south Asians in London, which cannot be blamed on migration alone. Cultural pressures that dictate the way stress is dealt with are examined and the effects of cultural conflict and changes in an individual's cultural identity are considered. Culture and Self-Harm offers a new preventative strategy that will be of theoretical and clinical interest to all mental health professionals, social workers, voluntary and primary care workers. It will help them understand significant factors that play a key role in the lives of south Asians who attempt suicide and what lessons can be learnt for dealing with other ethnic groups with the same problems.


Women in Modern India

Women in Modern India

Author: Geraldine Forbes

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1999-04-28

Total Pages: 316

ISBN-13: 9780521653770

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In a compelling study of Indian women, Geraldine Forbes considers their recent history from the nineteenth century under colonial rule to the twentieth century after Independence. She begins with the reform movement, established by men to educate women, and demonstrates how education changed women's lives enabling them to take part in public life. Through their own accounts of their lives and activities, she documents the formation of their organisations, their participation in the struggle for freedom, their role in the colonial economy and the development of the women's movement in India since 1947.


Renowned Goddess of Desire

Renowned Goddess of Desire

Author: Loriliai Biernacki

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2007-10-11

Total Pages: 313

ISBN-13: 0195327829

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The role of women and ideas of gender are fundamental components of all religious traditions. This book examines the representations of women within Tantra using a case study of a selection of Hindu Tantric texts from the 15th through 18th centuries in Northeast India.


Critical Perspectives on Indo-Caribbean Women's Literature

Critical Perspectives on Indo-Caribbean Women's Literature

Author: Joy Allison Indira Mahabir

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 041550967X

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This book is the first collection on Indo-Caribbean women's writing and the first work to offer a sustained analysis of the literature from a range of theoretical and critical perspectives, such as ecocriticism, feminist, queer, post-colonial and Caribbean cultural theories. The essays not only lay the framework of an emerging and growing field, but also critically situate internationally acclaimed writers such as Shani Mootoo, Lakshmi Persaud and Ramabai Espinet within this emerging tradition. Indo-Caribbean women writers provide a fresh new perspective in Caribbean literature, be it in their unique representations of plantation history, anti-colonial movements, diasporic identities, feminisms, ethnicity and race, or contemporary Caribbean societies and culture. The book offers a theoretical reading of the poetics, politics and cultural traditions that inform Indo-Caribbean women's writing, arguing that while women writers work with and through postcolonial and Caribbean cultural theories, they also respond to a distinctive set of influences and realities specific to their positioning within the Indo-Caribbean community and the wider national, regional and global imaginary. Contributors visit the overlap between national and transnational engagements in Indo-Caribbean women's literature, considering the writers' response to local or nationally specific contexts, and the writers' response to the diasporic and transnational modalities of Caribbean and Indo-Caribbean communities.


Staging Governance

Staging Governance

Author: Daniel O'Quinn

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2020-03-03

Total Pages: 427

ISBN-13: 1421429209

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Between 1770 and 1800, transformations in the relationship between metropolitan British society and its colonial holdings, and in the concept of the nation itself, left Britons with a new sense of themselves. Over the same period, the consolidation of the middle classes was accompanied by growing social constraints on sexuality and family life. Staging Governance locates the intersection of these two trends in the representation of British India on the London stage. Theatrical productions, especially those representing colonial life, pushed the limits of public discourse on sexuality and colonialism even as the government made efforts to shape and narrow them. At the same time, official discourse on colonial practices, such as the public trials of Clive and Hastings, became theatrical events themselves. Exploring this rapidly shifting world through a series of original readings of dramatic texts and important moments of oratory, Staging Governance demonstrates how the perceived crises of imperial and domestic Britain joined these spheres in the popular imagination. The economics of political and sexual exchange not only became entwined but functioned as mutual supports during a period of social, cultural, and political readjustment.