Gender and History Jyoti Atwal; Ciara Breathnach; Sarah-Anne Buckley
2022, 2023, 20220817, Letnik:
1
eBook
Odprti dostop
This book provides an overview of Irish gender history from the end of the Great Famine in 1852 until the foundation of the Irish Free State in 1922. It builds on the work that scholars of women’s ...history pioneered and brings together internationally regarded experts to offer a synthesis of the current historiography and existing debates within the field. The authors place emphasis on highlighting new and exciting sources, methodologies, and suggested areas for future research. They address a variety of critical themes such as the family, reproduction and sexuality, the medical and prison systems, masculinities and femininities, institutions, charity, the missions, migration, ‘elite women’, and the involvement of women in the Irish nationalist/revolutionary period. Envisioned to be both thematic and chronological, the book provides insight into the comparative, transnational, and connected histories of Ireland, India, and the British empire. An important contribution to the study of Irish gender history, the volume offers opportunities for students and researchers to learn from the methods and historiography of Irish studies. It will be useful for scholars and teachers of history, gender studies, colonialism, post-colonialism, European history, Irish history, Irish studies, and political history.
Ironically, feudal relations and embedded caste based gender exploitation remained intact in a free and democratic India in the post-1947 period. I argue that subaltern is not a static category in ...India. This article takes up three different kinds of genre/representations of “low” caste women in Indian cinema to underline the significance of evolving new methodologies to understand Black (“low” caste) feminism in India. In terms of national significance, Acchyut Kanya represents the ambitious liberal reformist State that saw its culmination in the constitution of India where inclusion and equality were promised to all. The movie Ankur represents the failure of the state to live up to the postcolonial promise of equality and development for all. The third movie, Bandit Queen represents feminine anger of the violated body of a “low” caste woman in rural India. From a dacoit, Phoolan transforms into a constitutionalist to speak about social justice. This indicates faith in Dr. B.R. Ambedkar’s India and in the struggle for legal rights rather than armed insurrection. The main challenge of writing “low” caste women’s histories is that in the Indian feminist circles, the discourse slides into salvaging the pain rather than exploring and studying anger.
This paper is a historiographical review of selected significant scholarship on widowhood in India. Most important conclusion is that the difference in widowhood experiences in India is premised upon ...the fact that the high-caste customs and cultural codes has created a disadvantageous gender equation for women. Nineteenth century legal-reformist debates around sati, widow remarriage and the age of consent were templates on which deep anxieties over the Hindu female body were expressed. Widow remarriage was a way of bringing this body back into the arena of reproduction and motherhood. While the actual practice of sati (widow self - immolation) was declared unlawful, the cultural codes upholding a widow’s imagined renunciatory powers were also being rewritten throughout the anti-colonial movement. A strong notion of a possible ‘living’ sati was created. The attributes of self-discipline and perfect control over one’s sexual desires and impulses became the highest preferable form of Hindu womanhood (irrespective of the caste and class of women). Besides nation building, the patriarchal perceptions of the ‘self-controlled’ body of a Hindu widow also facilitated the ease with which modernity could be fused with ideas of honour and self-abnegation amongst Hindu women. These ideas coexisted with the Indian reformist demand for enhanced property rights for women (widows in particular) and women’s growing role in the anti-colonial movement as well as in the post-1947 Indian society and economy.
This article visits moments of connected transnational histories of India and Ireland. Both the nations suffered under colonial rule. While Ireland attained independence from Britain in 1922, it ...continued to influence Indian revolutionaries and nationalists in several ways. The article provides an overarching review of some historical events that were reported in contemporary newspapers and remain main archives today for our knowledge on transnational anti colonial movements. Beginning with the perception of mutiny
in Indian and Irish memory – the author explores key events such as De Valera’s address to Gadar Party in America in 1920, reporting of Jallian wala Bagh massacre in Ireland, Connaught Rangers’ mutiny of 1920 and 1916 Easter Rising.
To begin with, the section on the mainstream reformers offers a brief overview of the nature of reform carried out in the late 19th century Bengal and Maharashtra. The second section, on widowhood ...and nationalism, looks into how the Hindu women in general and the widow in particular were recast by the urgency accorded to the redefinition of the subjected-self as against a glorious Hindu past. This article does not stop with their recasting, it goes beyond into the realm of widows self-perception and self-making.
This article engages with the question of how Hindi cinema sought to synergize and imagine the nation, community and land in independent India as the embodiment of widowhood. I suggest that this ...process of embodiment was the culmination of a long historical-political process. The focus of this chapter is a 1957 Hindi film by Mehboob Khan named Mother India. The film stands out as a powerful emotional drama. On the one hand, this film marked continuity with the Indian literature, painting, theatre and cinema of the colonial period,1 on the other, Mother India influenced the culture of a new Indian nation after 1947. Within a decade after India attained independence from Britain, the Indian cinema became an undisputed site where the cultural engineering of a new nation could be enacted.2
This article explores "connected" and "extended" cultural traumas in order to identify certain issues which dominated pensions of the war widows throughout twentieth century India. Nearly two million ...Indian men were recruited into the British army during the two World Wars. Despite the fact that notions of race and physical fitness of the Indian men in the war dominated this colonial relationship, about 22,000 Indian widows were receiving a pension by the end of the Second World War. At one level, it was the articulation of the shared cultural trauma by the Indian and British war widows which led the colonial state to adopt a special sense of duty to look after the welfare of the war widows and soldiers' dependents in India. As opposed to their Western counterparts, Indian widows in general face a wider set of challenges over the years after the husband's death. The Indian widow was initiated into an extended cultural trauma structured by intersectionality, i.e. religion, customary laws, caste and, most importantly, the question of remarriage. In present day India, widows/dependents of the World Wars are not treated on par with widows/dependents of the soldiers/officers who died fighting the wars in 1962, 1965, 1971 and 1999 with China and Pakistan respectively. This is based on the state-driven parameters of nationhood - that the former are the Empire's widows and the latter are widows of the Nation. This paper gives several examples of court cases filed by the widows themselves to show evidence of their trauma.
This article explores “connected” and “extended” cultural traumas in order to identify certain issues which dominated pensions of the war widows throughout twentieth century India. Nearly two million ...Indian men were recruited into the British army during the two World Wars. Despite the fact that notions of race and physical fitness of the Indian men in the war dominated this colonial relationship, about 22,000 Indian widows were receiving a pension by the end of the Second World War. At one level, it was the articulation of the shared cultural trauma by the Indian and British war widows which led the colonial state to adopt a special sense of duty to look after the welfare of the war widows and soldiers’ dependents in India. As opposed to their Western counterparts, Indian widows in general face a wider set of challenges over the years after the husband’s death. The Indian widow was initiated into an extended cultural trauma structured by intersectionality, i.e. religion, customary laws, caste and, most importantly, the question of remarriage. In present day India, widows/dependents of the World Wars are not treated on par with widows/dependents of the soldiers/officers who died fighting the wars in 1962, 1965, 1971 and 1999 with China and Pakistan respectively. This is based on the state-driven parameters of nationhood – that the former are the Empire’s widows and the latter are widows of the Nation. This paper gives several examples of court cases filed by the widows themselves to show evidence of their trauma.
PDF
