Browsing by Subject "Colonial India"
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Item Ideology at bay : Muslim high politics in Bengal’s last colonial decade(2015-05) Bhattacharjee, Dharitri; Guha, Sumit; Minault, Gail, 1939-; Louis, Roger; Ali, KamranThis dissertation argues how the imperative of surviving colonial legislative politics left little room for furthering of any ideology. As my primary tool of inquiry I use the political careers of Bengal’s only three chief ministers before independence, Fazlul Huq (1937-1941 and 1941-1943), Khwaja Nazimuddin (1943-1945) and Huseyn Suhrawardy (1946-1947).The four central chapters of my dissertation each deal with one ministerial tenure. I successively document how Huq, Nazimuddin and Suhrawardy resorted to different political techniques to confront the vicarious world of provincial politics. Huq’s contingent politics was a response to the new grant of provincial autonomy, under the penultimate Constitutional Act of 1935. Nazimuddin had to renegotiate a restrictive political space, caused by war calculations and the catastrophic 1943 famine. Suhrawardy’s transition from politics of exclusion to politics of inclusion, in what became the last year of British rule in India, was a desperate attempt to fight against partition of Bengal. Some ideologies were abandoned, some new ones embraced, and to some, only lip-service was paid. This dissertation is the first exploration of the parting of rhetoric and action in the tumultuous pre-Independence/partition decade in Bengal. To present this new understanding I use official documents and non-official sources such as journals, diaries, newspapers and letters from archives in Cambridge, London, Delhi, Kolkata and Dhaka. While the last colonial decade in Bengal has generated a lot of intriguing scholarship from social scientists, there has yet to be a substantial work on the Bengali Muslims for the period under study. Before the time of “history from below,” North India, Punjab specifically, was deemed to be most important for the pre-partition decade. By the time scholars started engaging with Bengal, a region that also underwent partition, the fascination with subaltern studies dictated a certain kind of work narrating people’s experiences. Consequently, the provincial high politics of Bengal never got the attention it deserved. My work fills this gap up by answering questions that have never even been asked. In the process I have brought to light neglected documents that I bring in dialogue with materials better known to scholars.Item Islam, modernity, and educated Muslims : a history of qasbahs in colonial India(2008-08) Rahman, M. Raisur; Minault, Gail, 1939-Qasbahs have remained outside academic purview and been neglected, despite an acknowledgement of their importance by scholars of South Asia. Loosely translated as small towns or large villages, qasbahs in South Asia form an interesting area to study in order to understand socio-cultural aspects of South Asian Muslim life and modernity. As official British sources unanimously suggest, qasbahs were important historically for their role in revenue collection. But that is definitely not their sole claim to significance for no one can deny the role that people from the qasbahs, particularly the ones in North India, have played in social, literary, and intellectual life. Crediting qasbahs and their inhabitants for their role in history and making a case for qasbah studies, this dissertation advances the argument that qasbahs were important intellectual centers. Combining the close-knit and warm social structure of villages and the intense intellectual activity of cities, they distinguished themselves from both village and city. Inhabited mostly by Muslims, qasbahs were not only the inheritors of an intellectual culture but were also equally instrumental in carrying that tradition forward through an unmatched level of literary production. The various genres of literature that they produced, mostly in Urdu, can greatly enhance our understanding of the fascinating history of a less known area. This dissertation also argues that since Muslims have been living in the qasbahs since the eleventh century, their long history of cross cultural encounters make qasbahs an exemplary site to understand modernity. Their encounter with the West was just another encounter for them, and, hence, their modernity was rich in experience and highly interactive in nature. As an underlying argument, this dissertation suggests that qasbahs in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century filled up the cultural vacuum created by the collapse of regional states in much the same way that regional states had become cultural centers upon the demise of the Mughal Empire in Delhi.Item New Frontiers: Women Writers and the British Raj(2018-04) Jarman, Cody; Wahl, MariahItem Routes of caricature : cartooning and the making of a moral aesthetic in Colonial and Postcolonial India(2007-12) Khanduri, Ritu Gairola; Brow, JamesThis dissertation is a historical- anthropological account of political cartooning in colonial and postcolonial India. Through a focus on representational politics and biography I have situated the history and practice of cartooning in India to unfold the link between politics, the making of a moral aesthetic and modernity. I am attentive to the shifts in this link by tracing the movement in three historical phases: colonial, nationalist, and postcolonial. These three interconnected parts of my dissertation span a period from the 1870s when vernacular versions of the British Punch began to be produced in colonial India and contemporary neo- liberal India that is seeing a profusion of pocket cartoons in local newspaper editions. In organizing the narrative in three political frameworks - the colonial, nationalist, and postcolonial I discuss the circuits of global interconnectedness through which a shifting moral aesthetic of the cartoon came to be formulated at different times and places in Indian politics. As an everyday cultural production, a focus on the cartoon in terms of "what the cultural consumer makes" as "a production of poiesis - but a hidden one" (de Certeau 1984) illuminates the liminal (Turner) dimension of the cartoon. Additionally, by situating the cartoon as a discursive site (Terdiman 1985) I want to draw attention to new analytical spaces it generates for the discussion and construction of democracy, secularism, minority rights and the modern state. In order to grasp the generative and interpretive dimension of the cartoon I point to three concepts: liminal form, moral aesthetic, and tactical modernity. These concepts open a space to think through the hegemonic processes that come into play at the cultural site of the cartoon and enable and analysis of the cartoon as a site generative of hegemonic processes. This attention to the cartoon as a discursive site in the public sphere highlights the transformative circuit from laughter to debate, from visual to written, and a moral aesthetic that gets switched on through the interpretive dilemmas and representational practices of the cartoon.Item Shatranj Ki Baazi: Muslim Women'S Activism, The Patriarchy, And Triple Talaq In Modi'S India(2019-05-01) D'Aguilar, Danielle Ayana; Azam, HinaIn August, 2017, the Indian Supreme Court ruled on a landmark case involving one Shayara Bano and four petitioners that instant triple talaq, a unique and controversial variation of an Islamic method for declaring divorce, was incompatible with the Indian constitution due to its detrimental effects on Muslim women and its lack of centrality to the religion. Many news and media sources both in India and around the world were quick to report this as a straightforward victory for Muslim women, while the male-dominated Islamic scholarly community expressed disdain at the least and outrage at the most. However, the matter is far more complicated and requires an understanding of history, social structure and political ideologies in India. The first portion of this paper analyzes the history of State intervention in Muslim personal law from the colonial period onward in an effort to contextualize and critique the current government’s actions. It then analyzes and compares the tactics and positions of four Muslim women’s activist groups and the one male-dominated group at the forefront of public discourse on instant triple talaq, as well as their responses to the Supreme Court judgement and Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s subsequent executive order to criminalize the practice. Ultimately, the paper aims to answer the following question: What do these groups approaches to activism and stances on instant triple talaq convey about the current state of gender politics in Islamic institutions in India? In the process of providing an answer, the paper also addresses issues such as the relationship between the State and religious minorities, the competing loyalties that face Muslim women, and the inevitable consequences of inviting a Hindu nationalist regime to intervene in a prolonged conflict between Muslim women and the patriarchal forces behind the Islamic institutions.