This Collection Of Essays On Politics, Medicine And Historiography Is About Those India Women Who Began To Be Educated And To Pay Some Role In Public Life.

Drawing on long-neglected travel writings by British women in India, this study looks at different aspects that women focus on as opposed to men, particularly in their encounters with Indian women in the zenana. Located at the cross-roads of feminist theory and colonial discourse theory, the book examines the power relations inscribed into the traveller's gaze.

"Women of India" by Otto Rothfield is a book about Indian women, their social life, and customs. Excerpt: "Many generations have passed and other races—Hunas and Gujjars and Mongols—have invaded India. And asceticism has squeezed the people in[6] its dry hand, and there has been war and bigotry and pestilence. Yet even now the teachings are not quite forgotten. Many a one there still is among the women of India, of whom it can with truth be said: "She is even as a golden lotus."

This collection of essays on Indian women is an important contribution to both Indian historiography and feminist studies. The book covers such topics as the Hindu Widow's Remarriage act of 1856, female infanticide, property rights, social welfare systems, and the struggle for the right to vote.

This collection of essays on Indian women is an important contribution to both Indian historiography and feminist studies. The book covers such topics as the Hindu Widow's Remarriage act of 1856, female infanticide, property rights, social welfare systems, and the struggle for the right to vote.

This book seeks to capture the complex experience of the white woman in colonial India through an exploration of gendered interactions over the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It examines missionary and memsahibs' colonial writings, both literary and non-literary, probing their construction of Indian women of different classes and regions, such as zenana women, peasants, ayahs and wet-nurses. Also examined are delineations of European female health issues in male authored colonial medical handbooks, which underline the misogyny undergirding this discourse. Giving voice to the Indian woman, this book also scrutinises the fiction of the first generation of western-educated Indian women who wrote in English, exploring their construction of white women and their negotiations with colonial modernities. This fascinating book will be of interest to the general reader and to experts and students of gender studies, colonial history, literary and cultural studies as well as the social history of health and medicine.

By the 1880s, Hindu domestic life and its most intimate relationships had become contested ground. For urban, middle-class Indians, the Hindu woman was at the center of a debate over colonial modernity and traditional home and family life. This book sets this debate within the context of a nineteenth-century world where bourgeois, European ideas on the home had become part of a transnational, hegemonic domestic discourse, a 'global domesticity.' But Walsh's interest is more in hybridity than hegemony as she explores what women themselves learned when men sought to teach them through the Indian advice literature of the time. As a younger generation of Indian nationalists and reformers attempted to undercut the authority of family elders and create a 'new patriarchy' of more nuclear and exclusive relations with their wives, elderly women in extended Hindu families learned that their authority in family life (however contingent) was coming to an end.

Co-published by Routledge and Edition Synapse, this new title makes key archival source material readily available to scholars, researchers, and students of Indian imperial history. The collection will be particularly welcomed by those working in women's and gender studies, and in women's history, but also by those active in allied and related fields. Selected and introduced by an expert editor, the gathered materials are reproduced in facsimile, giving users a strong sense of immediacy to the texts and permitting citation to the original pagination. Women in Colonial India is a veritable treasure-trove; it brings together key colonial documents and other materials which are currently widely dispersed or very difficult for scholars, researchers, and students across the globe to locate and use. In five volumes, the collection draws on a wide variety of sources, including periodicals, memoirs, parliamentary, and administrative reports. It covers crucial gendered concerns and topics, such as 'the woman question'; female infanticide; widow-burning; education; health; and marriage. Each volume is supplemented by a substantial introduction, newly written by the learned editor, which contextualizes the collected works, and this vital reference and research resource also includes a detailed appendix providing data on the provenance of the gathered works.

En-Gendering India offers an innovative interpretation of the role that gender played in defining the Indian state during both the colonial and postcolonial eras. Focusing on both British and Indian literary texts—primarily novels—produced between 1857 and 1947, Sangeeta Ray examines representations of "native" Indian women and shows how these representations were deployed to advance notions of Indian self-rule as well as to defend British imperialism. Through her readings of works by writers including Bankimchandra Chatterjee, Rabindranath Tagore, Harriet Martineau, Flora Annie Steel, Anita Desai, and Bapsi Sidhaa, Ray demonstrates that Indian women were presented as upper class and Hindu, an idealization that paradoxically served the needs of both colonial and nationalist discourses. The Indian nation’s goal of self-rule was expected to enable women’s full participation in private and public life. On the other hand, British colonial officials rendered themselves the protectors of passive Indian women against their “savage” male countrymen. Ray shows how the native woman thus became a symbol for both an incipient Indian nation and a fading British Empire. In addition, she reveals how the figure of the upper-class Hindu woman created divisions with the nationalist movement itself by underscoring caste, communal, and religious differences within the newly emerging state. As such, Ray’s study has important implications for discussions about nationalism, particularly those that address the concepts of identity and nationalism. Building on recent scholarship in feminism and postcolonial studies, En-Gendering India will be of interest to scholars in those fields as well as to specialists in nationalism and nation-building and in Victorian, colonial, and postcolonial literature and culture.