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Journal articles on the topic 'British women in colonial India'
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1
GUPTA, CHARU. "‘Innocent’ Victims/‘Guilty’ Migrants: Hindi public sphere, caste and indentured women in colonial North India." Modern Asian Studies 49, no. 5 (March 18, 2015): 1345–77. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0026749x14000031.
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AbstractThis article analyses representations of the indentured woman in the Hindi print-public sphere of colonial north India in the early twentieth century. There have been sophisticated studies on the condition of Indian women in the plantation colonies of the British Empire, this article focuses instead on the vernacular world within India, showing how the transnational movements of these women emigrants led to animated discussions, in which they came to be constructed as both innocent victims and guilty migrants, insiders and outsiders. The ways in which these mobile women came to be represented reveal significant intersections between nation, gender, caste, sexuality, and morality. It also demonstrates how middle-class Indian women attempted to establish bonds of diasporic sisterhood with low-caste indentured women, bonds that were also deeply hierarchical. In addition, the article attempts to grasp the subjective experiences of Dalit migrant, and potentially migrant, women themselves, and illustrates their ambivalences of identity in particularly gendered ways.
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SHARANYA. "An Eye for an Eye: the Hapticality of Collaborative Photo-Performance in Native Women of South India." Theatre Research International 44, no. 02 (July 2019): 118–34. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0307883319000014.
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This article examines the haptic politics of the Native Women of South India: Manners and Customs (2000–2004) ‘theatre museum’ composed by Indian performance artist Pushpamala N. and British photographer Clare Arni. Through a transnational collaboration, Native Women re-creates a visual genealogy of ‘popular’ Indian women images, reckoning with legacies of colonial and photographic studio photography. The article focuses on the engagements of Native Women with colonial representations of ‘the native’ (woman) in particular and asks: How does a transnational project resituating colonial ethnographic practices inform feminist performance methodologies? How does this photo-performance develop a haptic attempt at transnational solidarity? In what ways do haptic entanglements with photo-performance constitute new imaginations for collaborative practices? The article repositions Native Women as a performance work that reflects collaboration as a process of political intimacy.
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Jain, Sagaree. "The Queen’s Daughters: White Prostitutes, British India and the Contagious Diseases Acts." ANTYAJAA: Indian Journal of Women and Social Change 2, no. 1 (June 2017): 4–10. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/2455632717722655.
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Within the larger subject of the regulation of prostitution under the British Empire in South Asia, this article examines the figure of the White Prostitute in brothels and lock hospitals in colonial India. The White Prostitute in colonial India was in every way segregated from her native counterparts: in medicine, in physical quarters and in popular conceptions of her mobility, agency and rationality. Despite their mistreatment and vulnerability in many sources, white prostitutes were understood as closer to the ideal of regulable, liberal subjecthood compared to Indian women working in the same conditions and ultimately demonstrated the dynamism of the conditions of prostitution in this time and place. Through examination of literature, advocacy and military records, this article contends that the figure of the White Prostitute fractured concepts of caste-based prostitution in India and was wielded by imperial feminists to attack British regulation of prostitution and sexual slavery in India for brown as well as white women.
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Southard, Barbara. "Colonial Politics and Women's Rights: Woman Suffrage Campaigns in Bengal, British India in the 1920s." Modern Asian Studies 27, no. 2 (May 1993): 397–439. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0026749x00011549.
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The historian Geraldine Forbes, writing on the origins of the woman suffrage movement in India, stated: ‘the firm insistence of organized women—that they be treated as equals of men on the franchise issue—emerged not from the perceptions of the needs of the women in India, but as the result of the influence of certain British women, in the case of the first demand for the franchise, 1917, and as a response to the nationalist movement, in the case of the second demand for franchise, 1927–33.’
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Zaidi, Najia A. "Woman Subjection As Reflected In Sidhwa’s Cracking India." Pakistan Journal of Gender Studies 2, no. 1 (September 8, 2009): 79–90. http://dx.doi.org/10.46568/pjgs.v2i1.356.
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The Indian subcontinent gained independence from the British Raj in 1947, and got divided into two states: India and Pakistan. This division was the result of religious conflict that turned into a great tragedy of the region forcing millions to leave the part they were living in and killing large number of innocent people. Women became the worst victims of partition on both sides of the border. Sidhwa captures the position of woman through historical perspective. This paper examines the retelling of partition by Sidhwa in her novel Cracking India and portrays the exploitation, manipulation and oppression of women in relation to politics, religion and society. The publication of this novel establishes it as feminist text that calls for reconsideration of women’s rights and status in Post-Colonial Pakistan.
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Jhala, Angma D. "The Malabar Hill murder trial of 1925." Indian Economic & Social History Review 46, no. 3 (July 2009): 373–400. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/001946460904600305.
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This article seeks to address issues relating to sovereignty, law and sexual politics in colonial princely India through an examination of the Malabar Hill Murder Trial of 1925 in the Bombay High Court. In this particular case, the Hindu Maratha Maharaja of Indore was charged with the murder of his Muslim courtesan's lover. The ensuing trial illuminates two important developments in late colonial Indian law. First, it reveals how British courts empowered some Indian women as individual agents before the law, despite the restrictions of pardah (or seclusion), to contest and resist indigenous patriarchies. Second, it exposes the complex rela-tionship between Indian kingship and British paramountcy. Due to their position as semi-autonomous rulers, who were not under the restrictions of British Indian law, native princes were exempt from being tried in British Indian courts on the basis of their treaty regulations. This case discusses the extent to which the sexual desires and love unions of the Indian kings were affected by the princely state's fraught relationship with the colonial regime. In this in-stance, the Malabar Hill Murder trial cost the ruler his gaddi (throne) when he was compelled to abdicate.
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Sen, Indrani. "Devoted Wife/Sensuous Bibi: Colonial Constructions of the Indian Woman, 1860-1900." Indian Journal of Gender Studies 8, no. 1 (March 2001): 1–22. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/097152150100800101.
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Current research has rather tended to neglect the print culture of 19th-century British India and its contribution towards the formation of gender ideologies. This article attempts to scrutinise the clamorous voices of the print culture: the newspapers, popular periodicals as well as copious published works, and to unravel the complex and sometimes contradictory web of constructions that ihese built around the gendered colonised. The second half of the century witnessed a definite cultural focus on the Indian woman. Among other things, this interest took the form of a constant engagement with the subject of the 'native' female in the print culture of the British community resident in India. The article explores the multifaceted and pluralistic representation of the Indian woman, ranging from prurient accounts of native female sensuality and discussion of social reform issues to laudatory inscriptions of wifely devotion and the sati. In other words, the image of the Indian woman was constantly being reconstituted and proscriptions of her sensuousness were interwoven with prescriptions of passive feminine behaviour. Admired models of perceived Eastern female docility were often selectively drawn upon, in a process constituting an 'Indianisation' of the Anglo-Indian female paradigm. While it is well recognised that representations of Indian women were strategically linked to the agenda of empire, what this article also tries to show is that, due to the complex interconnections between the ideologies of gender and empire, these gender representations also served to contain disturb ing issues raised by the contemporary women's movement in England.
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Henry, Nancy. "GEORGE ELIOT AND THE COLONIES." Victorian Literature and Culture 29, no. 2 (September 2001): 413–33. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1060150301002091.
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Women are occasionally governors of prisons for women, overseers of the poor, and parish clerks. A woman may be ranger of a park; a woman can take part in the government of a great empire by buying East India Stock.— Barbara Bodichon, A Brief Summary in Plain Language, of the Most Important Laws Concerning Women (1854)ON OCTOBER 5, 1860, GEORGE HENRY LEWES VISITED a solicitor in London to consult about investments. He wrote in his journal: “[The Solicitor] took me to a stockbroker, who undertook to purchase 95 shares in the Great Indian Peninsular Railway for Polly. For £1825 she gets £1900 worth of stock guaranteed 5%” (qtd. in Ashton, Lewes 210). Thus Marian Evans, called Polly by her close friends, known in society as Mrs. Lewes and to her reading public as George Eliot, became a shareholder in British India. Whether or not Eliot thought of buying stock as taking part in the government of a great empire, as her friend Barbara Bodichon had written in 1854, the 5% return on her investment was a welcome supplement to the income she had been earning from her fiction since 1857. From 1860 until her death in 1880, she was one of a select but growing number of middle-class investors who took advantage of high-yield colonial stocks.1 Lewes’s journals for 1860–1878 and Eliot’s diaries for 1879–80 list dividends from stocks in Australia, South Africa, India, and Canada. These include: New South Wales, Victoria, Cape of Good Hope, Cape Town Rail, Colonial Bank, Oriental Bank, Scottish Australian, Great Indian Peninsula, Madras. The Indian and colonial stocks make up just less than half of the total holdings. Other stocks connected to colonial trade (East and West India Docks, London Docks), domestic stocks (the Consols, Regents Canal), and foreign investments (Buenos Aires, Pittsburgh and Ft. Wayne) complete the portfolio.2
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Legrandjacques, Sara. "Law of the Strongest? A Global Approach of Access to Law Studies and Its Social and Professional Impact in British India (1850s–1940s)." Social Sciences 10, no. 3 (March 23, 2021): 113. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/socsci10030113.
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This paper examines how access to law studies in British India challenged social stratifications within the colony, from the 1850s up to the 1940s. It highlights the impact of educational trajectories—colonial, imperial and global—on social positions and professional careers. Universities in British India have included faculties of law since the foundation of the first three universities in 1857. Although numerous native students enrolled at these Indian institutions, some of them chose to pursue their legal training in the imperial metropole. Being admitted into an Inn of Court, they could consequently become barristers, a title that was not available for holders of an Indian degree. This dual system differentiated degree-holders, complexifying the colonial hierarchy in a way that was sometimes denounced by both the colonized and the imperial authorities. Last but not least, access to higher education also impacted gendered identities: academic migration at times allowed some Indian women to graduate in Law but these experiences remained quite exceptional until the end of the Second Word War.
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Khattak, Zahir Jang, Hira Ali, and Shehrzad Ameena Khattak. "Post-colonial Feminist Critique of Roys The God of Small Thing." Global Social Sciences Review IV, no. II (June 30, 2019): 344–49. http://dx.doi.org/10.31703/gssr.2019(iv-ii).44.
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The present study intends to thoroughly examine the Postcolonial feminist perspective in Arundhati Roys novel The God of Small Things by focusing on the theoretical approaches of Gaytri Spivak, Trinh T.Minha and Ania Loomba. The ambivalent personality of colonized women is tarnished due to subalternity imposed by the patriarchal culture of India. The destructive nature of the Western Imperialism forced the people to endure wild oppression by British colonizers. Postcolonialism paved the way for the double oppression of women. Women became the victim of not only British Imperialists but also native cultural patriarchy. Roy successfully intricates three generations of women i.e Baby Kochamma, Mammachi, Ammu, and Rahel into the fabric of the novel to acme the plight of women in the Third World Nations..
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Cheema, Iqra Shagufta. "Print Capitalism." ISLAMIC STUDIES 60, no. 1 (March 31, 2021): 53–72. http://dx.doi.org/10.52541/isiri.v60i1.1117.
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Benedict Anderson connects the rise of print capitalism to the rise of nationalism in Europe as well as in the colonies. Print capitalism and nationalism shared a similar relationship in the Indian subcontinent too that remained a British colony for almost 200 years, from 1757 to 1947. Employing Deputy Nazir Ahmad’s novel, Mir’āt al-‘Urūs (1869), I argue that the introduction of print capitalism proved crucial to the rise of Muslim national consciousness and for Muslim women’s education to redefine their sociopolitical role in the new Muslim imagined community under British colonization. Print capitalism, via the possibility of mass-produced books like Mir’āt al-‘Urūs, transformed the Muslim national imagination by making Indian Muslims a community in anonymity. I offer this new reading of Mir’āt al-‘Urūs to trace the interaction of print capitalism, Muslim national consciousness, and new roles for Muslim women in colonial India.
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Mukherjee, Sayan. "Dark Portrayal of Gender: A Post-colonial Feminist Reflection of Bapsi Sidhwa’s The Pakistani Bride and The Ice-candy Man." History Research Journal 5, no. 5 (September 26, 2019): 81–88. http://dx.doi.org/10.26643/hrj.v5i5.7919.
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The portrayals of women by fiction writers of Indian sub-continent can be seen in the context of postcolonial feminism. Sidhwa’s novels may be a part of postcolonial fiction, which is fiction produced mostly in the former British colonies. As Bill Ashcroft suggests in The Empire Writes Back, the literatures produced in these areas are mostly a reaction against the negative portrayals of the local culture by the literatures produced in these areas are mostly a reaction against the negative portrayals of the local culture by the colonizers. About the role of postcolonial literature with respect to feminism, Ashcroft writes, “Literature offers one of the most important ways in which these new perceptions are expressed and it is in their writings and through other arts such as paintings sculpture, music, and dance that today realities experienced by the colonized peoples have been most powerfully encoded and so profoundly influential.” Indian sub-continent fiction is the continuation and extension of the fiction produced under the colonial rulers in undivided India. As such it has inherited all the pros and cons of the fiction in India before the end of colonial rule in Indo-Pak. Feminism has been one part of this larger body of literature. Sidhwa has portrayed the lives of Pakistani women in dark shades under the imposing role of religious, social, and economic parameters. These roles presented in The Pakistani Bride and The Ice-Candy Man are partly traditional and partly modern – the realities women face.
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Finn, Margot C. "MATERIAL TURNS IN BRITISH HISTORY: III. COLLECTING: COLONIAL BOMBAY, BASRA, BAGHDAD AND THE ENLIGHTENMENT MUSEUM." Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 30 (November 11, 2020): 1–28. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0080440120000018.
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ABSTRACTThis lecture explores the history of Enlightenment-era collecting of antiquities to probe the claims to universality of Western museums. Focusing on the British Museum's Enlightenment Gallery, it underscores the imperial and familial contexts of British collecting cultures. Questioning received narratives of collecting which highlight the role played by individual elite British men, it suggests that women, servants and non-European elites played instrumental parts in knowledge production and the acquisition of antiquities. The private correspondence of the East India Company civil servant Claudius Rich – the East India Company's Resident or diplomatic representative at Baghdad 1801–1821 – and his wife Mary (née Mackintosh) Rich illuminates social histories of knowledge and material culture that challenge interpretations of the British Museum's Enlightenment Gallery which privilege trade and discovery over empire.
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NARAYAN, ROCHISHA. "Widows, Family, Community, and the Formation of Anglo-Hindu Law in Eighteenth-Century India." Modern Asian Studies 50, no. 3 (February 4, 2016): 866–97. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0026749x15000116.
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AbstractLate eighteenth-century colonial agrarian and judicial reforms had a direct impact on women from elite and non-elite backgrounds. Informed by British liberal ideologies and upper-caste Brahmanical norms, colonial policies marginalized women's access to, and control over, resources in the emergent political economy. In this article, I reconstruct histories of the ways in which Anglo-Hindu law compromised women's status as heirs, businesswomen, and members of society who wielded social capital with other community groups. Focusing on widows in Banaras who commandeered their property disputes, I illustrate that pre-colonial precedents of case-resolution under the Banaras rulers, and practices of ‘forum shopping’ by disputants themselves, shaped the widows’ approach to the colonial courts. Colonial judicial plans being incommensurable to everyday life, the courts incorporated pre-colonial forms of dispute handling and maintained a flexible approach to the practice of colonial law under the supervision of an Indian magistrate for a period of time. These characteristics made the courts popular among local society in the Banaras region. However, British officials, insistent on applying abstract scriptural laws, aligned customary practice to the dictates of Anglo-Hindu law. This article shows that the narrow legal subject position available to widows under scriptural law reordered their relationships with family and community networks to their disadvantage.
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Morgan, Ruth A. "Health, Hearth and Empire: Climate, Race and Reproduction in British India and Western Australia." Environment and History 27, no. 2 (May 1, 2021): 229–50. http://dx.doi.org/10.3197/096734021x16076828553511.
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In the wake of the Indian Uprising in 1857, British sanitary campaigner and statistician Florence Nightingale renewed her efforts to reform Britain's military forces at home and in India. With the Uprising following so soon after the Crimean War (1854-56), where poor sanitary conditions had also taken an enormous toll, in 1859 Nightingale pressed the British Parliament to establish a Royal Commission on the Sanitary State of the Army in India, which delivered its report in 1863. Western Australia was the only colony to present its case before the Commissioners as an ideal location for a foreign sanatorium, with glowing assessments offered by colonial elites and military physicians. In the meantime, Nightingale had also commenced an investigation into the health of Indigenous children across the British Empire. Nearly 150 schools responded to her survey from Ceylon, Natal, West Africa, Canada and Australia. The latter's returns came from just three schools in Western Australia: New Norcia, Annesfield in Albany and the Sisters of Mercy in Perth, which together yielded the highest death rate of the respondents. Although Nightingale herself saw these inquiries as separate, their juxtaposition invites closer analysis of the ways in which metropolitan elites envisioned particular racial futures for Anglo and indigenous populations of empire, and sought to steer them accordingly. The reports reflect prevailing expectations and anxieties about the social and biological reproduction of white society in the colonies, and the concomitant decline of Indigenous peoples. Read together, these two inquiries reveal the complex ways in which colonial matters of reproduction and dispossession, displacement and replacement, were mutually constituting concerns of empire. In this article I situate the efforts to attract white women and their wombs to the temperate colony of Western Australia from British India in the context of contemporary concerns about Anglo and Aboriginal mortality. In doing so, I reflect on the intersections of gender, race, medicine and environment in the imaginaries of empire in the mid-nineteenth century.
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Vanina, Eugenia Yu. "“Women’s Dynasty”: A Golden Century of an Indian Princely State." Oriental Courier, no. 1-2 (2021): 130. http://dx.doi.org/10.18254/s268684310015818-7.
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Bhopal, one of six hundred “native states” in colonial India, was for more than a century ruled by a unique “women`s dynasty”. At the same time, the men of the princely family, including the queens’ spouses, were entirely incompetent and pushed away from political life. Four generations of female rulers became famous for their energetic and effective works: always loyal to Islam and Muslim culture, they challenged gender stereotypes (both in their families and in the British administration), protected and ameliorated the territory, undertook many reforms and infrastructural projects, contributed significantly to female education and health protection, pursued the policy of religious tolerance. The achievements of the Bhopal queens earned recognition both from their compatriots and from colonial suzerains. The article discussed the life stories of the four women rulers, their “female destinies” against the background of the colonial epoch and its political crises, in relations with their families, local elites, and British administration.
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Visweswaran, Kamala. "‘My words were not cared for’: Customary law, criminality and the ‘woman question’ in late colonial India." Contributions to Indian Sociology 52, no. 2 (June 2018): 156–85. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0069966718763419.
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Drawing upon the court case of one woman sentenced for killing her infant in the early decades of the last century, this article reads Pierre Bourdieu’s insight on how the trial stages conflicts produced in the social realm as a paradox for explaining how British administrators and Indian village officials negotiated non-conflicting codes of sexual and moral conduct on the basis of colonial ideology and locally fixed caste hierarchies to convict women of infanticide. This article argues that a staging of women’s agency is crucial for understanding the colonial conferral of legal subjectivity and for a gendered critique of the Subaltern Studies paradigm of conflict or collaboration as ‘dominance without hegemony.’
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Sharma, Varun. "Criminalizing Nomadic Femininity: Colonial Trail of the Kathua Rape–Murder." ANTYAJAA: Indian Journal of Women and Social Change 5, no. 1 (December 5, 2019): 40–51. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/2455632719880867.
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A reading of Michael Kennedy’s (1908) treatise on ‘criminal classes’ in British India offers fresh perspective on the Kathua rape–murder in historical terms. What emerges through an exercise that connects past to present, colony to nation, is how the pending fate of a Bakarwal girl was first inscribed in colonial ink for being a nomad, and later fulfilled in Independent India for being a Muslim. The manner in which the colonial programme of stigmatizing nomadic societies, particularly its women and children, is being adapted, intensified and given renewed direction through Hindu hyper-nationalism is thus underscored. The failure of civil society to recognize the refraction of colonial power in a communal atmosphere, and thus come up with promising alternatives to prevent such crimes, is further highlighted.
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HINCHY, JESSICA. "Gender, Family, and the Policing of the ‘Criminal Tribes’ in Nineteenth-Century North India." Modern Asian Studies 54, no. 5 (February 3, 2020): 1669–711. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0026749x19000295.
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AbstractIn the South Asian setting, the fields of gender history and family history are still predominantly concerned with relatively elite social groups. Few studies have examined issues of gender and the family in the history of Dalit, low-caste, and socially marginalized communities, especially those that were labelled ‘criminal tribes’ from the mid-nineteenth century on. This article explores the ways in which gender patterned criminalized communities’ experiences of everyday colonial governance under Part I of the 1871 Criminal Tribes Act (CTA) in the first two decades that it was enforced in northern India. In this early period, the colonial government did not closely regulate marriage practices, domestic arrangements, or the gendered organization of labour within communities categorized as ‘criminal tribes’. Nevertheless, notions of sexuality and gender underlay colonial knowledge of the ‘criminal tribes’, which emerged in dialogue with middle-class Indian gender and caste politics. Moreover, the family unit was the central target of the CTA surveillance and policing regime, which aimed to produce ‘industrious’ families. Officially endorsed forms of labour had complex implications for criminalized communities in the context of North Indian gender norms and strategies of social mobility. Gender power dynamics also shaped criminalized peoples’ interpersonal, embodied interactions with British and Indian colonial officials on an everyday basis. Meanwhile, different forms of leverage and evasion were open to men and women to cope with their criminalization and so the colonial state was experienced in highly gendered ways.
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Chakravarty, Ishita. "Owners, creditors and traders: Women in late colonial Calcutta." Indian Economic & Social History Review 56, no. 4 (October 2019): 427–56. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0019464619873800.
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This article tries to reconstruct the world of the property-owning, mortgage-holding and money-lending women in late colonial Bengal and especially in Calcutta, the commercial capital of British India until the First World War. It argues that as all poor women occupying the urban space were not either sex workers or domestic servants, similarly all middle-class women in colonial Calcutta were not dependent housewives, teachers and doctors. At least a section of them engaged in other gainful economic activities. However, existing scholarship sheds very little light on those women who chose other means of survival than the bhadramahila: those who bought and sold houses, lent money for interest, acquired mortgages, speculated in jute trade and even managed indigenous banking business. Evidence of court records suggests that they, along with the lady teacher, the lady doctor, the midwife and the social worker or later members of political organisations, could be found in considerable numbers in late colonial Calcutta. Due to the enactment of stringent laws to control moneylending, on the one hand, and the commercial decline of Calcutta, on the other hand, these women were possibly driven out of the shrinking market of the 1940s and 1950s.
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Barton, Patricia. "Imperialism, Race, and Therapeutics: The Legacy of Medicalizing the “Colonial Body”." Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics 36, no. 3 (2008): 506–16. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1748-720x.2008.298.x.
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The BiDil controversy in America coincides with a renewed interest in the linkages between race and therapeutics, whether in the medical history of the United States itself, or in the colonial world. During the colonial era in South Asia, many anthropological and medical researchers conducted research which compared the European and “colonial” body, contrasting everything from blood composition to brain weight between the races of the Indian Empire. This, as Mark Harrison has shown, was fundamentally a phenomenon of the 19th century, arguing that “[i]t was only after 1800 that racial identities came to be fixed and that India was viewed with terror, as a reservoir of filth and disease.” Racist attitudes in British Indian colonial medicine are not hard to discover. They underpinned, for instance, campaigns to improve the appallingly high maternal and infant mortality rates in which the blame was placed squarely upon the women and the indigenous midwives who delivered them rather than the poverty in which they lived. As such, Peers Dimmock, a professor of gynecology and obstetrics at the Calcutta Medical School, opened his address to the First Indian Medical Congress in 1894 with a diatribe against “the unclean and repulsive traditionary [sic] methods of the native midwives.”
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Sunanda Kapoor and Eva Prasher. "“Reviving Twentieth-century Medical Legacy – The Case of Banarasi Dass Women’s Hospital, Sadar Bazaar, Ambala Cantonment, India”." Creative Space 6, no. 2 (January 8, 2019): 53–66. http://dx.doi.org/10.15415/cs.2019.62004.
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One of the notable advancements of late 19th-early 20th century British India was the introduction of ‘western-style’ medical care for women. Located within confines of the colonial or princely enclaves, a number of women’s hospitals, staffed with trained British female doctors, were established under the Dufferin Fund. But the benefits of medicalised childbirth did not extend to commonplace Indian women. At this point of time, history was also made by certain philanthropic and nationalist individuals who made some pioneering efforts to extend benefits of medicalised childbirth to the vast neglected body of commonplace Indian women.The 48-bedded Banarsi Dass Hospital for Women, built in 1922 within the dense urban fabric of Ambala Cantonment, is one of the earliest of such pioneering structures. The architectural value of the building as seen in its ingenious spatial organization was devised to ensure generous access to sun and air, ensured thermal comfort in all seasons, a construction system representative of the era, and various ornamental elements that proclaim its ‘monumental’ status adds to its unique historic significance. Though the building is still in a good physical and structural condition, the advancement in medical world has rendered its infrastructure obsolete.In the present scenario, we tend to lose a significant landmark of 20th century development in India. This paper presents an analysis of the historic, societal and architectural value of the property, the reasons for its disuse and the design interventions proposed to restore the original societal and architectural status of this majestic historic building.
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LEE, KUN JONG. "Heinz Insu Fenkl's Memories of My Ghost Brother: An Amerasian Rewriting of Rudyard Kipling's Kim." Journal of American Studies 42, no. 2 (August 2008): 317–40. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0021875808004702.
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Heinz Insu Fenkl's Memories of My Ghost Brother is an Amerasian rewriting of Rudyard Kipling's Kim. Fenkl transforms the adventures of a white boy in colonial India into those of an Amerasian boy in post-/neocolonial Korea and changes the Russo-British rivalry of the nineteenth-century Great Game into the Russo-/Communist–American competition of the twentieth-century Cold War. He resurrects the native voice silenced by colonial discourse and highlights the dilemma of Asian women and their biracial children. He ultimately denounces the troubling legacy of the US military presence in Korea and critiques the centuries-old Western imperialist project in Asia.
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CAPLAN, LIONEL. "Iconographies of Anglo-Indian Women: Gender Constructs and Contrasts in a Changing Society." Modern Asian Studies 34, no. 4 (October 2000): 863–92. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0026749x00003784.
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Of late, increasing attention has focused on (mainly male) constructions of women in colonial India. On the one side, it has been noted how European women were frequently held responsible and disparaged for upsetting the comparatively relaxed relationships existing between British (especially males) and Indians (especially females) up to the late eighteenth century. Seen as the staunchest upholders (if not the keenest advocates) of racial distinctions which evolved in the course of the nineteenth century, European women were vilified for elaborating (if not actually creating) social and cultural hierarchies which led to a widening of the distance between colonizer and colonized. At the same time, they were stereotyped as frivolous, vain, snobbish and selfish (Barr 1976: 197; 1989: 1; Brownfoot 1984: 186). Indeed, Gartrell suggests that ‘few women have been described so negatively as the British memsahibs’ (1984: 165). In drawing attention to these portrayals, a number of writers have recently pointed out, in mitigation, that the memsahibs were simply reproducing official British attitudes, were themselves proud symbols of British power, and subjects of a strict patriarchal culture within European circles (see Barr 1989: 5; Bharucha 1994: 88–9).
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Sen, Satadru. "Policing the Savage: Segregation, Labor and State Medicine in the Andamans." Journal of Asian Studies 58, no. 3 (August 1999): 753–73. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/2659118.
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The penal colony that the british established in the Andaman Islands at the end of the 1850s was originally intended as a place of permanent exile for a particular class of Indian criminals. These offenders had, for the most part, been convicted by special tribunals in connection with the Indian rebellions of 1857–58. As the British vision of rehabilitation in the Andamans evolved, the former rebels were joined in the islands by men and women convicted under the Indian Penal Code. In the islands, transported criminals were subjected to various techniques of physical, spatial, occupational, and political discipline (Sen 1998). The slow transition from a convicted criminal to a prisoner in a chain gang, to employment as a Self-Supporter or a convict officer in the service of the prison regime, to life as a free settler in a penal colony was in effect a process by which the state sought to transform the criminal classes of colonial India—the disloyal, the idle, the elusive and the disorderly—into loyal, orderly, and governable subjects.
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CHATTERJEE, INDRANI. "Women, Monastic Commerce, and Coverture in Eastern Indiacirca1600–1800 CE." Modern Asian Studies 50, no. 1 (August 14, 2015): 175–216. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0026749x15000062.
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AbstractThis article argues that economic histories of the transition to colonial economics in the eighteenth century have overlooked the infrastructural investments that wives and widows made in networks of monastic commerce. Illustrative examples from late eighteenth-century records suggest that these networks competed with the commercial networks operated by private traders serving the English East India Company at the end of the eighteenth century. The latter prevailed. The results were the establishment of coverture and wardship laws interpellated from British common law courts into Company revenue policies, the demolition of buildings. and the relocation of the markets that were attached to many of the buildings women had sponsored. Together, these historical processes made women's commercial presence invisible to future scholars.
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Vanina, E. Yu. "FOREIGN SERVANTS IN AN INDIAN PRINCELY STATE BHOPAL (19TH — EARLY 20TH CENTURIES)." Journal of the Institute of Oriental Studies RAS, no. 3 (13) (2020): 151–63. http://dx.doi.org/10.31696/2618-7302-2020-3-151-163.
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Bhopal, one of the ‘princely states’ and vassals of the British Empire (Central India), enjoyed special favour with its sovereign. Throughout a century, it was ruled by four generations of women who gained themselves, in India and outside, the reputation of enlightened and benevolent monarchs. Archival documents and memoirs allow glancing at the hitherto hidden world of domestic servants who not only ensured the comfortable and luxurious life of the princely family, but its high status too, both for fellow Indians and for British colonial administrators. Among the numerous servants employed by the Bhopal rulers, freely hired local residents prevailed. However, the natives of some other countries, quite far from India, were conspicuous as well: the article highlights West Europeans, Georgians and Africans (“Ethiopians”). In the princely household, foreign servants performed various functions. While British butlers and Irish or German nannies and governesses demonstrated the ruling family` s “Westernized” lifestyle, Georgian maids and African lackeys showcased the affluence and might of the Bhopal queens. Some foreign servants came to Bhopal by force: the reputation of ‘progressive’ was no obstacle for the Bhopal queens to use slave labour. When such cases became public, the British authorities responded with mild reproaches: condemning slavery, they nevertheless loathed any discord with their trusted vassals.
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Burton, Antoinette. "Contesting the Zenana: The Mission to Make “Lady Doctors for India,” 1874–1885." Journal of British Studies 35, no. 3 (July 1996): 368–97. http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/386112.
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Recent work in British studies suggests that the project of historicizing the institutions and cultural practices of British imperialism is crucial to understanding metropolitan society in the nineteenth century. Monographs by Catherine Hall, Thomas C. Holt, and Jenny Sharpe, together with the impressive nineteen-volume series on Studies in Imperial Culture, edited by John Mackenzie—to name just a few examples of scholarly production in this field—have effectively relocated the operations of imperial culture at the heart of the empire itself. By scrutinizing arenas as diverse as the English novel, governmental policy making at the highest levels, and the ephemera of consumer culture, scholars of the Victorian period are in the process of giving historical weight and evidentiary depth to Edward Said's claim that “we are at a point in our work when we can no longer ignore empires and the imperial context in our studies.”The origins of the London School of Medicine for Women (LSMW), its concern for Indian women in the zenana (sex-segregated spaces), and the embeddedness of its institutional development in Victorian imperial mentalities is one discrete example of how ostensibly “domestic” institutions were bound up with the empire and its projects in nineteenth-century Britain. As this essay will demonstrate, the conviction that Indian women were trapped in the “sunless, airless,” and allegedly unhygienic Oriental zenana motivated the institutionalization of women's medicine and was crucial to the professionalization of women doctors in Victorian Britain. One need only scratch the surface of the archive of British women's entry into the medical profession to find traces of the colonial concerns that motivated some of its leading lights.
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Amstutz, Andrew. "A New Shahrazad." Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 40, no. 2 (August 1, 2020): 372–86. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/1089201x-8524292.
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Abstract In 1945, Mahmooda Rizvia, a prominent Urdu author from Sindh, published a travel account of her journey across the Arabian Sea from British India to Iraq during World War II. In her travel account, Rizvia conceptualized the declining British Empire as a dynamic space for Muslim renewal that connected India to the Middle East. Moreover, she fashioned a singular autobiographical persona as an Urdu literary pioneer and woman traveler in the Muslim lands of the British Empire. In her writings, Rizvia focused on her distinctive observations of the ocean, the history of the Ottoman Empire, and her home province of Sindh's location as a historical nexus between South Asia and the Middle East. In contrast to the expectations of modesty and de-emphasis on the self in many Muslim women's autobiographical narratives in the colonial era, Rizvia fashioned a pious, yet unapologetically self-promotional, autobiographical persona. In conversation with recent scholarship on Muslim cosmopolitanism, women's autobiographical writing, and travel literature, this article points to the development of an influential project of Muslim cosmopolitanism in late colonial Sindh that blurred the lines between British imperialism, pan-Islamic ambitions, and nationalism during the closing days of World War II.
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LEGG, STEPHEN. "Stimulation, Segregation and Scandal: Geographies of Prostitution Regulation in British India, between Registration (1888) and Suppression (1923)." Modern Asian Studies 46, no. 6 (March 21, 2012): 1459–505. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0026749x11000503.
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AbstractThis paper explores the regulation of prostitution in colonial India between the abolition of the Indian Contagious Diseases Act in 1888 and the passing of the first Suppression of Immoral Traffic Act in 1923. It challenges the commonly held assumption that prostitutes naturally segregated themselves in Indian cities, and shows that this was a policy advocated by the Government of India. The object was to prevent the military visiting these segregated areas, in the absence of effective Cantonment Regulations for registering, inspecting, and treating prostitutes. The central government stimulated provincial segregation through expressing its desires via demi-official memoranda and confidential correspondence, to which Rangoon and Bombay responded most willingly. The second half of the paper explores the conditions, in both India and Ceylon, that made these segregated areas into scandalous sites in the early twentieth century. It situates the brothel amongst changing beliefs that they: increased rather than decreased incidents of homosexuality; stimulated trafficking in women and children; and encouraged the spread of scandalous white prostitutes ‘up-country’, beyond their tolerated location in coastal cosmopolitan ports. Taken alongside demands that the state support social reform in the early twentieth century, segregation provided the tipping point for the shift towards suppression from 1917 onwards. It also illustrates the scalar shifts in which central-local relations, and relations between provinces, in government were being negotiated in advance of the dyarchy system formalized in 1919.
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GOODALL, HEATHER, and DEVLEENA GHOSH. "Reimagining Asia: Indian and Australian women crossing borders." Modern Asian Studies 53, no. 04 (December 7, 2018): 1183–221. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0026749x17000920.
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AbstractThe decades from the 1940s to the 1960s were ones of increasing contacts between women of India and Australia. These were not built on a shared British colonial history, but on commitments to visions circulating globally of equality between races, sexes, and classes. Kapila Khandvala from Bombay and Lucy Woodcock from Sydney were two women who met during such campaigns. Interacting roughly on an equal footing, they were aware of each other's activism in the Second World War and the emerging Cold War. Khandvala and Woodcock both made major contributions to the women's movements of their countries, yet have been largely forgotten in recent histories, as have links between their countries. We analyse their interactions, views, and practices on issues to which they devoted their lives: women's rights, progressive education, and peace. Their beliefs and practices on each were shaped by their respective local contexts, although they shared ideologies that were circulating internationally. These kept them in contact over many years, during which Kapila built networks that brought Australians into the sphere of Indian women's awareness, while Lucy, in addition to her continuing contacts with Kapila, travelled to China and consolidated links between Australian and Chinese women in Sydney. Their activist world was centred not in Western Europe, but in a new Asia that linked Australia and India. Our comparative study of the work and interactions of these two activist women offers strategies for working on global histories, where collaborative research and analysis is conducted in both colonizing and colonized countries.
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DEACON, HARRIET. "MIDWIVES AND MEDICAL MEN IN THE CAPE COLONY BEFORE 1860." Journal of African History 39, no. 2 (July 1998): 271–92. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0021853798007191.
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Relatively little research has been done on the history of midwifery at the Cape, although there has lately been increasing interest in the social history of medicine, as well as in the history of abortion, rape, infanticide and motherhood in South Africa. One of the reasons for the dearth of research is the relative absence of women, especially black women, from the historical record. The archival record of what was called the Cape Colony during the early nineteenth century is rich enough to reveal something about women's history, however. The Cape was first settled by Europeans in 1652 under the auspices of the Dutch East India Company (DEIC), and was captured by the British in 1795 and again in 1806. During the first half-century of British rule at the Cape, urban midwives came under greater professional and official scrutiny and left some traces in the historical archive. The remaining absences tell their own stories, too, and in this paper these silences will be made to speak, if only softly and tentatively, of the role of women in colonial African medical care.
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Lal, Ananda. "Acts of Authority/Acts of Resistance: Theater and Politics in Colonial and Postcolonial India. By Nandi Bhatia. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2004; pp. vi + 206 pp. $49.50 cloth." Theatre Survey 46, no. 2 (October 25, 2005): 311–13. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0040557405210207.
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There are few dependable books in English on political theatre in India. Professor Bhatia's collection of essays, therefore, fills a long-felt need. She introduces the subject contextually, followed by four chapters chronologically examining key areas (British censorship of nationalistic drama, Indianizations of Shakespeare as an anticolonial statement, the Indian People's Theatre Association as a mass phenomenon in the mid-twentieth century, and Utpal Dutt's reinterpretation of Raj history in his play The Great Rebellion 1857), and concludes with a short epilogue on contemporary activist theatre by women. Most valuably for theatre historians, she places in the public domain many primary sources previously untapped in English, and unearths much secondary material that has escaped academic attention. Not least of all, she writes articulately and readably.
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Arora, Poonam. ""Imperilling the Prestige of the White Woman": Colonial Anxiety and Film Censorship in British India." Visual Anthropology Review 11, no. 2 (September 1995): 36–50. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/var.1995.11.2.36.
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PRICE, PAMELA G. "Honor, Disgrace and the Formal Depoliticization of Women in South India: Changing Structures of the State under British Colonial Rule." Gender & History 6, no. 2 (August 1994): 246–64. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0424.1994.tb00005.x.
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Noor Hamid, Khan, Zubair Muhammad, and Hussan Sumbul. "Frontier Crimes Regulations (FCR), Status of Fundamental Human Rights in FATA and Pakistan’s International Obligations." Global Social Sciences Review I, no. II (December 30, 2016): 74–97. http://dx.doi.org/10.31703/gssr.2016(i-ii).06.
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After taking control of the North West Frontier from Sikhs, British India introduced a special legal and administrative system, Frontier Crimes Regulation (FCR) in the early 1870s to administer the frontier. The suppression of resistance to British rule from the native people being its main objective, this special code was in violation of the very fundamental human rights. In this research paper, the researcher will give a brief overview of FCR and will highlight the harsh nature of this colonial-era regulation which violates basic rights of people of Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA). The paper will analyze the implications of FCR for the rights including right to self-determination, equality between man and women, freedom of expression, freedom of religion, right to peaceful assembly and protest, and equal treatment before law. International Human Rights Law (IHRL) will be applied as theoretical framework for this paper. This research paper is based on both primary and secondary sources. Interviews, participant observation, colonial era reports and documents include in primary sources. The method for this analysis will be first to state very briefly as to what standards the articles of the ICCPR demand of states parties to it, and then explain in detail the actual position of these rights in FATA.
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Levine, Philippa. "Rereading the 1890s: Venereal Disease as “Constitutional Crisis” in Britain and British India." Journal of Asian Studies 55, no. 3 (August 1996): 585–612. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/2646447.
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My tale is an eloquent one, with heroes and villains, crises and angst, passion and fury. What it lacks in resolution it more than makes up for in dramatic tension. It is a story set in Britain and India in the 1890s, a time of intense polarities. This was the decade in which Oscar Wilde, Britain's most lionized playwright, was imprisoned for homosexuality; in which the spark of “new unionism” flared and then fizzled; in which Britain competed in the “scramble for Africa,” adding new colonial possessions to its already ample stockpile. It was the decade of imperial budgets, of mounting tension in South Africa, of the call for tariff reform, of the “new Woman,” and of that curious political hybrid, Liberal-Unionism.
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WALLACE, BRIAN. "NANA SAHIB IN BRITISH CULTURE AND MEMORY." Historical Journal 58, no. 2 (May 11, 2015): 589–613. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0018246x14000430.
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AbstractThe Indian Rebellion leader Nana Sahib became Victorian Britain's most hated foreign enemy for his part in the 1857 Cawnpore massacres, in which British men, women, and children were killed after having been promised safe passage away from their besieged garrison. Facts were mixed with lurid fiction in reports which drew on villainous oriental stereotypes to depict Nana. The public appetite for vengeance was thwarted, however, by his escape to Nepal and subsequent reports of his death. These reports were widely disbelieved, and fears persisted for decades that Nana was plotting a new rebellion in the mountains. He came to be seen as both a literal and symbolic threat; the arrest of suspects across the years periodically revived the memories and the atavistic fury of the Mutiny, while his example as the Victorians' archetypal barbaric native ruler shaped broader colonial attitudes. At the same time, he influenced metropolitan perceptions of empire through the popular Mutiny fictions in which he was a larger-than-life villain. Tracing Nana's changing presence in the British collective memory over generations illustrates the tensions between metropolitan and colonial ideas of empire, and suggests the degree to which an iconic enemy figure could shape perceptions of other races.
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Maskiell, Michelle. "Embroidering the Past: Phulkari Textiles and Gendered Work as “Tradition” and “Heritage” in Colonial and Contemporary Punjab." Journal of Asian Studies 58, no. 2 (May 1999): 361–88. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/2659401.
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While the men worked in the fields in the wine-like [winter] air, the women sat in the afternoon sun spinning and embroidering while they sang together, before starting to cook for their men. They embroidered phulkaris….” (Tandon 1968, 65). These stereotypes of feminine and masculine work in Prakash Tandon's memory book Punjabi Century illustrate dominant literary representations of economic production in Punjab, a province of the British Raj from the mid-nineteenth century until it was partitioned between independent India and Pakistan in 1947 (see fig. 1). Many Punjabi women used phulkari (literally, “flower-work”) embroidery to decorate their daily garments and handmade gifts in the nineteenth century. Illustrations only partially convey the vibrant visual impact of phulkaris, and even color photographs fail to capture fully the sheen of the silk thread. The embroidery ranges from striking geometric medallions in reds, shocking pinks, and maroons, through almost monochromatic golden tapestry-like, fabric-covering designs, to narrative embroideries depicting people and objects of rural Punjab. Women stitched phulkaris generally on handwoven cotton cloth (khadi), and phulkaris shared linked construction techniques, a dominant embroidery stitch (the darning stitch), and several distinctive motifs (Frater 1993, 71–74; Yacopino 1977, 42–45; Askari and Crill 1997, 95–101).
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Yang, Victoria. "Land Tenure Rights in India: an analysis of the failure of amendments to the Hindu Succession Act." SURG Journal 5, no. 1 (December 23, 2011): 49–53. http://dx.doi.org/10.21083/surg.v5i1.1329.
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The right to a minimum standard of living as a basic human right is recognized internationally. As Hernando DeSoto argues in his book, The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else, a clear, legal definition of property rights is essential in an owner’s realization of return to their capital [1]. This would enable an individual in a developing country to raise their standard of living, thus contributing to the recognition of the right to property as a basic human right [2]. The implementation of property rights has become a priority for governments, NGOs, and international development agencies in many countries. While the right to property legally applies to both sexes, it is not extended to women in practice. Amendments to section 6 of the Hindu Succession Act in 2005 legitimized land ownership and inheritance for Indian women [4]. However, the 2006 Agricultural Census indicates that only 10.7% of Indian landowners are women [5]. The failure of implementation of legal changes regarding property rights and women can be attributed to cultural and religious opinions of women, traditional land tenure systems established before British colonial rule, and government bias within legislation. The Indian government must consider preexisting cultural norms and de facto property rights in the employment of new legislations, as they may impose costs on women. In order for changes in legislation to be effective, they must be inclusive of all women of different religious backgrounds, and simultaneous changes across government sectors must be enacted.
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Lawson, Kate. "INDIAN MUTINY/ENGLISH MUTINY: NATIONAL GOVERNANCE IN CHARLOTTE YONGE'S THE CLEVER WOMAN OF THE FAMILY." Victorian Literature and Culture 42, no. 3 (June 6, 2014): 439–55. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1060150314000084.
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In the opening chapter of Charlotte Mary Yonge's The Clever Woman of the Family, six-year-old Francis Temple, on first having “the pebbly beach, bathing machines and fishing boats” of the English seaside pointed out to him, judges it all to be “ugly and cold.” “I shall go home to Melbourne when I am a man,” he declares (53; ch. 1). This early and unfavourable contrast between England and one of its colonies exemplifies the novel's larger project of judging England and English society through values established in colonial locales, a project that reaches its apogee when Francis and his older brother Conrade judge the conduct of a cruel and duplicitous Englishwoman to be “as bad as the Sepoys” and thus hope that she will be “blown from the mouth of a cannon” (340, 342; ch. 18). While the narrator comments that here the children exhibit “some confusion between mutineers and Englishwomen,” the narrative in its entirety suggests that such “confusion” is founded on a reasonably astute appraisal of colonial history and contemporary English society (342; ch. 18). Published in 1865, with memories of the Indian “Mutiny” of 1857–59 fresh in the public's mind, The Clever Woman of the Family is a critique of contemporary England and English values viewed through a colonial and military lens. More particularly, the novel records the after effects of the “Mutiny” – when sepoys were indeed “blown from the mouth of a cannon” – on early 1860s England, as characters shaped by the “Indian war” and bearing scars both physical and emotional flock home to the small English seaside town of Avonmouth (120; ch. 5). These characters, all associated with the British Army, were involved in some of the key events of the “Mutiny,” such as the siege of Delhi, and include in their number a young wounded war hero, Captain Alick Keith, winner of the Victoria Cross. The novel's older hero is Colonel Colin Keith, also recovering from wounds sustained in India. Under his protection is Lady Fanny Temple, widow of General Sir Stephen Temple, with her seven young children born, severally, in the Cape Colony, India and Australia. Together these characters – shaped by their experiences in the empire and the army – confront and then transform the England to which they return.
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Akai, Joanne. "Creole… English: West Indian Writing as Translation." TTR : traduction, terminologie, rédaction 10, no. 1 (February 27, 2007): 165–95. http://dx.doi.org/10.7202/037283ar.
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Abstract Creole... English: West Indian Writing as Translation — This paper looks at the use of language(s) in Indo-Caribbean (i.e., West Indian of East Indian descent) writings. West Indian writers are Creole, in every sense of the term: born in (former) British colonies, they have a hybrid culture and a hybrid language. They operate from within a polylectal Creole language-culture continuum which offers them a wide and varied linguistic range (Creole to Standard English) and an extended cultural base ("primitive" oral culture to anglicized written culture). Indo-Caribbean writers, however, have access, not only to the Creole language-culture continuum, but also to the pre-colonial cultural, linguistic and religious traditions of their ancestors who came from India in the 19th century. But if Creole is the mother-tongue of all West Indians, English is the only language they know to read and write. West Indian literature in English constitutes an intricately woven textile of Creole and English : a hybrid writing made possible through the translation of Creole experience into English; oral Creole culture into written English; the Creole language into the English language. In fact, West Indian literature in English can be considered self-translation, for which the presence of the author as the translator gives authority to the hybridized product, a true extract of the West Indian writer and his Caribbean language-culture.
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Dequen, Jean-Philippe. "Back to the Future? Temporality and Society in Indian Constitutional Law: A Closer Look at Section 377 and Sabarimala Decisions and the Genealogy of Legal Reasoning." Journal of Human Values 26, no. 1 (January 2020): 17–29. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0971685819890181.
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‘On the 26th of January 1950, we are going to enter into a life of contradictions. In politics we will have equality and in social and economic life we will have inequality’. B. R. Ambedkar’s famous last speech to the Constituent Assembly on 25 November 1949 still resonates within contemporary Indian constitutional law, and even more so his following interrogation: ‘how long shall we continue to live this life of contradictions?’ Prima facie societal, the contradiction is however also a temporal one, Indian constitutional law being founded on both the British traditional idea of ‘continuum’ and the American inspired revolutionary principles of ‘pursuance’ of a novel legal and social order. Two recent Indian Supreme Court decisions pertaining to the de-criminalisation of same sex relations ( Navtej Singh Johar v. Union of India) and for the right of menstruating women to enter the Sabarimala Temple in Kerala ( Indian Young Lawyers Association v. Union of India) offer through their differing and sometimes dissenting opinions a glimpse at those temporal contradictions. Through an analysis of both decisions and in particular that of Chandrachud J. and Malhotra J.’s judgements, this article seeks to highlight two radically differing conceptions of temporality applied to constitutional issues, which can themselves be linked back to the transposition of the legal positivist discourse in India within the colonial era: on the one hand, an attempt to continue Common law’s empirical-based tradition and on the other hand, an (apparently) a-historical perception of Law drawn from neo-Roman civilian legal discourse and later normative positivism. If both branches of legal reasoning aim at protecting minorities’ rights, the value they inscribe to History within the realm of Law cannot be further apart.
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Magaziner, Daniel R. "Removing the Blinders and Adjusting the View: A Case Study from Early Colonial Sierra Leone." History in Africa 34 (2007): 169–88. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/hia.2007.0011.
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Mende raiders caught Mr. Goodman, “an educated young Sierra Leonean clerk,” at Mocolong, where he “was first tortured by having his tongue cut out, and then being decapitated.” His was a brutal fate, not unlike those which befell scores of his fellow Sierra Leoneans in the spring of 1898. Others were stripped of their Europeanstyle clothes and systematically dismembered, leaving only mutilated bodies strewn across forest paths or cast into rivers. Stories of harrowing escapes and near-death encounters circulated widely. Missionary stations burned and trading factories lost their stocks to plunder. Desperate cries were heard in Freetown. Send help. Send gun-boats. Send the West India Regiment. Almost two years after the British had legally extended their control beyond the colony of Sierra Leone, Mende locals demonstrated that colonial law had yet to win popular assent.In 1898 Great Britain fought a war of conquest in the West African interior. To the northeast of the Colony, armed divisions pursued the Temne chief Bai Bureh's guerrilla fighters through the hot summer months, while in the south the forest ran with Mende “war-boys,” small bands of fighters who emerged onto mission stations and trading factories, attacked, and then vanished. Mr. Goodman had had the misfortune to pursue his living among the latter. In the north, Bai Bureh fought a more easily definable ‘war,’ a struggle which pitted his supporters against imperial troops and other easily identified representatives of the colonial government. No reports of brutalities done to civilians ensued. In the south, however, Sierra Leoneans and missionaries, both men and women, joined British troops and officials on the casualty rolls.
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Fischer-Tiné, Harald. "'White women degrading themselves to the lowest depths' : European networks of prostitution and colonial anxieties in British India and Ceylon ca. 1880-1914." Indian Economic & Social History Review 40, no. 2 (June 2003): 163–90. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/001946460304000202.
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Halvorson, Sarah J., and James L. Wescoat Jr. "Guarding the Sons of Empire: Military–State–Society Relations in Water, Sanitation and Health Programs of mid-19th-Century India." Water 12, no. 2 (February 5, 2020): 429. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/w12020429.
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Drinking water supply and sanitation have had a strong association with military institutions in South Asia from the colonial period to the present. This paper shows how military-state-society relationships created spaces of differential water access and sanitation burdens in mid-19th-century cantonments in ways that involved complex gender relations. In comparison with previous research, we argue that privileged military enclaves were segregated but never fully separated from larger urban water and sanitation systems. We use historical geographic methods to review the evolving role of military sanitation regulations in cantonments from late-18th-century policies of the East India Company (EIC) through mid-19th-century rule by the British Crown, during which time military cantonments, regulations, and formal monitoring reports were established. Close reading of the British Army Medical Department’s Statistical, Sanitary, and Medical Reports (Sanitary Reports) in the 1860s then shows how military-state-society relations diverged from civilian public health programs in ways that persist to some extent to the present day. Health advisors, some of them women, pursued an ideology and tactics to “guard the sons of empire”, from what they perceived to be a disease-filled landscape of “lurking evils”, “choleric attacks”, and “native offensives”. We conclude with a discussion of both continuities and change in the relationships between military and civilian public health reforms beyond the barracks.
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Di Paolo, Jennifer. "Violence Against Native American Women in the United States." Politikon: The IAPSS Journal of Political Science 20 (June 29, 2013): 174–87. http://dx.doi.org/10.22151/politikon.20.12.
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In response to the topic of Global Justice and Human Rights: Country Case Studies, I will discuss the origin and continuation of violence against Native American women in the United States. In a report named Maze of Injustice: The Failure to Protect Indigenous Women from Violence by Amnesty International, the organization deemed the current status of violence against indigenous women one of the most pervasive yet hidden human rights abuses. The U.S Department of Justice has found that Native American and Native Alaskan women are 2.5 times more likely to be raped or sexually assaulted. During an International Expert Group Meeting discussing Combatting Violence Against Indigenous Women and Girls, the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs declared it a human rights issue of epidemic proportions. One in three Native American women are raped and three in five are physically assaulted. In reference to interracial violence, four out of five Native American victims of sexual assault reported that the perpetrator was white. Unfortunately due to the shame and stigma surrounding topics such as sexual assault and rape it is estimated that in reality these numbers are far higher. Scholars and historians of pre-colonial Native societies have found that during this period women held prominent positions and violence against women was rare. With colonization came a radical change to the role of women in Native society. Gender based violence and the exclusion of women in important positions was a powerful tool used by British settlers to dismantle the structures of native society and ultimately conquer it. Presently, due to the inadequate legal power given to Indian nations the crisis is not being dealt with efficiently. For example, Indian nations are unable to prosecute non-Indian offenders. In my discussion of violence against Native women in the United States I will begin by analyzing its colonial origins. Next I will discuss why this violence persists today with reference to laws and judicial processes. Finally, I will discuss what must be done to end these human rights abuses.
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Colley, Linda. "The Politics of Eighteenth-Century British History." Journal of British Studies 25, no. 4 (October 1986): 359–79. http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/385871.
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Britain's “long” eighteenth century, which began with one aristocratic revolution in 1688 and ended with another in 1832, was a pageant of success. The nation's art and architecture reached their elegant and original best. Its capital became the center of print culture, finance, fashion, and commercial creativity, the largest and most vibrant city in the Western world. The British constitution became a topic for eulogy, as much by the unenlightened and illiterate at home as by the Enlightenment literati abroad. The armed forces, fiscal system, and bureaucracy of the British state grew in efficacy and range, bringing victory in all but one of a succession of major wars. Legitimized by achievement and buttressed by massive economic and political power, Britain's landed elite kept at bay every domestic revolution except the industrial one, which only enriched it more. The American Revolution, of course, was not averted; but while this crisis embarrassed the British Empire, it did not destroy it. Even before 1776, the conquest of Canada had reduced the thirteen colonies' strategic significance, just as their profitability to the mother country had been outstripped by its Indian possessions; their final loss was made up, and more than made up, with relentless and almost contemptuous speed. Between 1780 and 1820 some 150 million men and women in India, Africa, the West Indies, Java, and the China coast succumbed to British naval power and trading imperatives.
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MORAN, ARIK. "‘The Rani of Sirmur’ Revisited: Sati and sovereignty in theory and practice." Modern Asian Studies 49, no. 2 (September 17, 2014): 302–35. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0026749x13000401.
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AbstractIn ‘The Rani of Sirmur: An Essay in Reading the Archives’, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak offered a literary analysis of British records to demonstrate the inextricability of language from the colonial/imperial project's goal of world domination. Honing her arguments on the threat of a Himalayan queen (rani) to ‘become sati’ (i.e. immolate herself), Spivak interpreted the event as representative of the plight of subalterns and of ‘third world women’ in particular. However, a close reading of the records reveals profound discrepancies between Spivak's interpretation and conditions that existed in and around the kingdom at the time. This article contextualizes the rani's story by supplementing archival sources with folk traditions, local histories, and recent research on sati and Rajput women. It shows that the rani was actually an astute ruler, similar to her peers in the West Himalayan elite, and that her threat of suicide resulted from reasons that go beyond an alleged attempt at recovering agency from the dual oppressions of patriarchal indignity and an invasive superpower. The discourses about sati in contemporary texts are also investigated, revealing a considerable overlap in South Asian and European views of sati among Himalayan elites in turn-of-the-nineteenth-century northwest India.
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Nicolini, Beatrice. "The Western Indian Ocean as Cultural Corridor: Makran, Oman and Zanzibar through Nineteenth Century European Accounts and Reports." Middle East Studies Association Bulletin 37, no. 1 (2003): 20–49. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0026318400045417.
Full textAbstract:
This article examines European perceptions and misperceptions, distortions, exaggerations and misunderstandings of western Indian Ocean societies in the 19thcentury. For this work I have combined research on European sources, both published and manuscript, and mostly from the British archives, with field research that I have carried out in southwest Asia, Arabia, and east Africa. The fact that most European observers of Indian Ocean societies in the 19thcentury carried the baggage of British and French colonial policy, and that they tended to lack deep knowledge of the region as well as empathy for the people, combined to produce a certain historical, political and cultural approach to local realities, which, in some cases, is still unmodified today. Through my own field research I have met with local tribal elites in Makran, Baluchistan and Oman, and with leaders of the major Swahili families of Zanzibar. I have shared tea and stories with old women. These contacts provide an invaluable insight into local interpretations of regional history, through the historical memory preserved in rituals and tales. This research also makes possible a new understanding of the significance of places, and the historical events associated with them.