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Chapter 4 focuses on how women should cope with a hardship crisis in their marriage. It studies Sita's resolve to leave purdah and follow Rama in his exile, comparing with the Gopis’ leaving their domestic safety to join Krishna in the forest to dance the Rasa‐lila. In both cases, while the men are originally reluctant to let the women join them, the women argue that their love overrides concerns of dharma, and they win the argument. However, the liberating potential of these examples is mitigated by the televised series’ concerns to keep the women within maryada, notwithstanding their rhetoric. Thus, Ramanand Sagar's Sita's choice is portrayed as one of identification with her husband and foregoing the easy option of returning to her paternal home. In Shri Krishna the Gopis undergo a fire‐ordeal (Agnipariksha) to prove their credentials, a scenario that plays out again and again in popular movies. Movies discussed are Yahi hai zindagi, Hum aapke hain koun..!, Meera ka Mohan and Lagaan.

This chapter argues that Protestant Christian women in the West were intrigued by the purdah system in India, partly because it resonated with patterns of gender segregation with which they were familiar. The aspects of the gender ideology embodied in purdah that were retained in the new hybrid discourse of femininity resulting from the interaction between Protestant missionaries and representatives of elite Indian culture are examined. This is followed by an analysis of the history of the zenana missions, tracking the changes in the strategies for the reform of Indian women and their relationship to the Indian home as the focus of missions shifted from elite to low-caste women.

Baul women are caught between having to meet the expectations of potential sponsors, who seek Bauls who act unencumbered (as described in Chapter 2), and the expectations of neighboring non-Baul community members, who view such Baul behavior as antithetical to the good Bengali wife and mother (the focus of this chapter). Chapter 3 looks specifically at how Baul women describe patriarchal discourses of feminine respectability, paying particular attention to the ways in which Baul women compare their own lives and behaviors with those of their neighbors. It also compares gendered norms and expectations with Baul discourses about the value and respect due women.

Nazir Ahmad was not only a novelist but also a versatile scholar, a gracious teacher, and a social reformer. He and Sayyid Ahmad built a reputation as defenders of the same ideal: the harmony of faith and reason. Nazir Ahmad's novels mirror the Indian society. He saw women being cloistered in the private realm of the family, and knew that the reach of Islam's ideals of equality and gender justice was severely constrained by the institution of marriage that empowered men and disempowered women. Nazir Ahmad took part in debates that offer a glimpse into north India's social, political, and intellectual history. Citing the Koran and the numerous Hadis, he argued that the theoretical equality of all Muslims should be put into practice. This chapter examines Nazir Ahmad's views on Islam and modernism as well as purdah, polygamy, and Muslim women's rights, as well as his affirmative uses of rhetoric.

Lahore was one of the principal Muslim cities in Punjab and where the author spent time as the guest of a rich landowner. There the author met Begam Shah Nawaz, who gave her information about the position of women, especially of Muslim women, in the Punjab. The author visited a college for young women in Purdah and attended a tea party given by the Women's Club or Clubs. Begam Shah Nawaz also took her to Shalimar Garden, the royal park where the old Muslim sultans came for rest and pleasure in the days gone by. Another great community in Lahore was that of the Sikhs. The author considered Lahore as a bridge that linked the Frontier to the rest of India, both geographically and in terms of mentality.

This chapter examines the role of gender in shaping medical care for women in India. Orientalist essentializations about native women were reiterated in the construction of the zenana patient, whose observance of female seclusion was believed to expose her to illness and suffering. The Dufferin Fund epitomized colonial ideals of medical philanthropy and provided zenana medical care by supplying female doctors for Indian women. The difficulties of subsuming all Indian women in the figure of the zenana patient were exposed when zenana medical care had to accommodate patients who did not practise purdah. As a quasi-governmental organization, the Fund was closely linked to the colonial state through vicereines acting as incorporated wives. The growing importance of female medical experts, represented by the Association of Medical Women in India, marked a shift from maternal imperialism to feminization of the empire, with demands for state involvement in providing medical care for Indian women.

This chapter analyses how the hyper masculine ethos that underlay the institution of the Khalsa corresponded well with the sexual ethos prevailing in Victorian England. Victorian constructions of masculinity—with its apotheosis in the imperial ‘civilizer’—and the domestication of the female had profound ramifications on the imperial project in India. After the Annexation of Punjab, the British came face to face with a Sikh state, with a complete and fully organized feudal system. The author describes how the British admiration of the defeated Maharaja Ranjit Singh and the Sikh community resulted in their detailed attempts to understand the Sikhs and Sikhism. The military spirit of the Khalsa brotherhood came to be appreciated, and the brave Jat Sikh came to be understood as a fellow Aryan. Analogies between the Christian and Sikh faiths came to be drawn, and Christian missionaries considered that the reforming spirit introduced by Guru Nanak could be fulfilled by the truths of Christianity. While Sikh women were admired for their late marriage age, the absence of purdah, their energy in the fields, and the tradition of the remarriage of widows to brothers of the dead husband (karewa), the British disapproved of Sikh female rulers like Maharani Jindan. They also found Sikh women to be ignorant and lacking in education. The author concludes by describing how this dichotomy of response to the Sikh woman resulted in the Punjab Educational Department being set up in 1856 for the education of females. By the end of the nineteenth century, this project was taken over by the Singh Sabha Reform Movement.

This chapter analyzes how Yemeni and Bangladeshi American women and teenage girls in Hamtramck establish a particular type of gender organization—what I call “civic purdah”—across a variety of different contexts. Although there is no exact word for it in Arabic, Bangladeshis and other South Asians use the word “purdah” to signify gender separation, most often in expressed through patterns of dress (hijāb) and proximity, enacted in an effort to protect the sanctity of women’s bodies and spaces from the gaze and interference of unrelated men. Civic purdah signifies the way that women interpret and apply the purdah ethos in the municipal context as a means of participating in different aspects of city life. When enacted in public spaces and institutions, civic purdah can be considered a means for advancing cultural citizenship, defined as engaging in the dominant society while maintaining differences from the norm.

This chapter looks at Motilal’s term in the Moderate party. It first examines his presidential speech for the third United Provinces Social Conference, where he talked about social reform and the removal of caste and purdah. It then looks at Motilal’s expectations of the Secretary of State, John Morley’s ability and desire to open a new chapter in Indo-British relations. However, Morley’s true agenda was discovered after the reform proposals were published. Still, Motilal was elected into the larger provincial council under the ‘reformed’ constitution, where he criticized the little allocations given for education and sanitation. The chapter also studies the twenty–sixth session of the Indian National Congress. This session was held in Allahabad and included a convening of a Hindu-Muslim conference and the formation of the Hindu Mahasabha.

The chapter begins with an overview of the ambiguous position of India’s maharajas and princes both under British paramountcy and after 1947 in independent India. It then focuses on the royal family that ruled over the important Rajput state of Kutch in western India and presents an account of the royal court and of courtly life from the perspective of the then Maharani, Rajendra Kunverba, later Queen Mother or Rani Mata. Using material from a series of discussions recorded in the late 1980s to early 1990s the chapter explores the place of women in the royal court and in its women’s quarters (the zenana). It then builds up a picture of the structures of power that operated in the zenana and considers how far they paralleled structures evident in the male-dominated court with its royal audience ritual of the durbar. The account concludes with a discussion of the Maharani’s emergence from the closed world of the zenana and with how her actions were affected by the climate of a modernising India.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of Maithil women and storytelling. Through the imperatives of purdah, Maithil womanhood entails a significant degree of constriction of movement and speech both in and outside domestic spaces. They do, however, tell and listen to stories in the context of women- and children-only settings and have collectively promulgated a rich body of tales, which, while inevitably modified at least slightly with each telling, nonetheless display strong continuities in their themes, structures, and complexity of cosmological thinking and moral lessons. The behavioral norms of purdah have never been totalizing, yet they have been subject to new challenges as well as reassertion in the era of globalization, with its attendant and uneven expansion of mobility, mediation, education, and consumption. It is in these shifting conditions that Maithil women continue to weave their tales and navigate the terrain of their increasingly unstable lives.

Reading a seafarer’s travelogue that circulates today in Urdu and English, this chapter examines seven of Khawajah Muhammad Bux’s voyages. Beginning his life as a lascar at the bottom of the racial hierarchy of a British ship, Bux was a wealthy merchant by the end of his days in 1920s Lahore. He recounted a lengthy family history to his scribe that was published recently in Urdu as Lahore Ka Sindbad (Sindbad of Lahore), and as ‘Memoirs of Khawajah Muhammad Bux’ in English. Placing the text within a wider world of Indian Ocean circulations of narratives, I examine the path the text lays out for future generations of South Asians crossing the seas.

This chapter focuses on the everyday lives of the girls inside the madrasa to understand the tension between the ideational construct of an ideal Muslim women and its practice. The madrasa students’ espousal and embodiment of madrasa norms coexists with practices that are not permissible in the madrasa.

Chapter 4 explores the origins of Bangladesh’s relatively advanced policies regarding women in the development project, which it traces to the perception that the economic basis for customary gender relations had broken down irretrievably in the wake of the war and the famine. The break had its roots in a longer process of agrarian crisis, but was triggered in particular by mass wartime rapes and the emergence of a distinct population of women without male protection in the early 1970s. Following Deniz Kandiyoti, this moment of rupture is analysed as the ‘breaking of the patriarchal bargain’. From this moment, several of the key orientations towards gender-aware public policies and programmes emerged.

If the rite of widow-immolation fired Western imagination at the turn of the nineteenth century, then purdah (life in seclusion) held captive the West’s attention at the turn of the twentieth. Purdah took on a special connotation especially during the British Raj. With the gradual rise of the novel ideas of nationhood across religions, languages or cultures of the subcontinent, purdah became more than the sceptre of male prescriptive authority for upholding religious/cultural precepts of a community. It became further charged as the confrontational ground of conflicting authority—for one race to rule and for the other to forge its identity as a self-ruling nation. Not only is women’s representation of purdah in their writings considered more authentic but they also often challenge the stereotyping of a purdahnashin and reject the broad-brushed, mono-toned portrayal of their existence. Although Hindus too practised purdah of a sort, this chapter focuses on two Muslim women writers (Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain and Iqbalunnissa Hussain).

This chapter presents the ways in which, because of her unique grounding in more than one kind of lineage, land, learning, and labor, Sorabji claims to be a citizen of the British Empire. She is consistently characterized as an “other,” both in England and in an emerging India; her Parsee lineage and cultural as well as intellectual affiliation with the values of imperial England are the basis for her distance from, but also advocacy of, the purdahnashin (Indian women in purdah). This chapter illustrates her problematic relationship with the concept and category of “native,” even as she claims belonging.

This chapter narrates and contextualizes the story of the Australian educationist Leonora Gmeiner, an Australian teacher who travelled to India in the 1890s inspired by the ideals of Theosophical education. Gmeiner lived in India for twenty-nine years, participated in Gandhian campaigns to abolish the indenture system, took part in Annie Bessant’s Home Rule League activities, and served as the principal of the Indraprastha Hindu Girls’ School in Delhi, where she was joined by other similarly inspired Australian women. Gmeiner dedicated her life to the physical, moral, intellectual, and spiritual training of Indian girls to bring them out of purdah and make them politically active full citizens of the emerging Indian nation. This chapter argues for an alternative to ‘White Australian’ attitudes to India and demonstrates that the circulation of knowledge and ideas flowed from the Antipodes to India as well as through Indian migration south.

This chapter focuses on the discursive and active power struggles at the heart of the Sikh Empire in the precarious years between the First Anglo-Sikh Wars and the final subjection of Punjabi independence to British rule in March 1849. Building on the previous chapter, it brings to light the gendered tensions at the centre of both British and Punjabi challenges posed to the leadership of Maharani Jind Kaur, mother and regent for the infant Maharajah Duleep Singh. It unravels the ramifications of direct colonial interference into the Lahore government imposed by the Resident, Henry Montgomery Lawrence; the impact of which compounded and exacerbated internal problems that had already weakened the ruling dynasty’s grip on power following the succession struggle between Maharani Chand Kaur and Prince Sher Singh. It provides a new series of arguments about the cultural and imperial politics that contributed to the destabilization of the ruling dynasty’s power and the eventual fall of the kingdom.