Charu Gupta
Biographic Data
| ID | 235877 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Charu Gupta |
| GIVEN NAMES | Charu |
| FAMILY NAME | Gupta |
| SIGNATURE | GUPTA C |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Delhi |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9523-4437 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 40 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 79 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 40 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1991 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Laughing at Brahmanical Orthodoxy: Dube ji ki Chitthi and the Satirical Hindi Public Letter in Colonial India
This article examines Dube ji ki Chitthi (1924–44), a satirical epistolary column by Vishwambharnath Sharma ‘Kaushik’, to explore the political power of vernacular humour in colonial Hindi print culture. Written in the guise of a rotund, bhang-loving Brahman, Dube ji’s public letters deployed conversational rhythm, earthy idioms and performative satire to critique the rigidities of Sanatani Hinduism and Brahmanical pretensions. These letters blur…
Caste-ized Cities: Sweepers in Early Twentieth-Century United Provinces
This essay examines the historical construction of sweepers’ roles in early twentieth-century United Provinces, highlighting the intersections of caste, labor, and urban governance. It explores sweepers’ indispensable yet stigmatized work in sanitation, epidemic control, and municipal systems, revealing how colonial authorities and native elites reinforced casteist exclusion through surveillance and dehumanization. Sweepers were caricatured as ei…
Performing Masculinities: Hindu Reform, Ascetic Celibacy, and Dalit Manhood in Colonial North India
This article examines the construction of masculinity in early twentieth-century North India through Hindi vernacular print. Focusing on three key narratives—upper-caste Hindu masculinity in the shuddhi and sangathan movements, ascetic celibacy in the writings of Satyadev Parivrajak and representations of Dalit manhood—it explores how masculinity became a site of power, hierarchy and resistance. While dominant Hindu masculinities reinforced caste…
Novel Applications of Kasim: Heritage Meets Haute Couture
This study explores the revitalization of Kasim, a traditional natural dye, through its application in modern fashion. Kasim, a dye historically integral to Indian crafts such as Kalamkari, Bagh, and Ajrakh, has been crafted over generations by fermenting jaggery and iron fillings. When applied to fabric pre-mordanted with myrobalan, it produces a distinct black hue, traditionally used for freehand painting and block printing of design outlines. …
Hindi Hindu Histories: Caste, Ayurveda, Travel, and Communism in Early-Twentieth-Century India
Kitchen Hinduism: Food politics and Hindi cookbooks in colonial North India
This article deliberates on the entanglements between politics and the history of food, health, and gender in Hindu middle-class households of early twentieth-century North India, through the genre of printed cookbooks in Hindi. While cookbooks became important nodes through which to construct an ideal Hindu housewife and kitchen, they were also a place where educated, middle-class women's voices came to be heard, recorded, and published. The art…
Self-Fashioning of a Hindu Political Sanyasi: Muscular Asceticism and Sectarian Freedom in Swami Satyadev Parivrajak’s Autobiography
This essay focuses on the autobiographical writings of Swami Satyadev ‘Parivrajak’ (1879–1961), a prolific Hindi writer, and a charismatic modern-day worldly political ascetic in the early twentieth-century north India. It discusses three central pillars of his ineradicably political autobiography: first, the performance of an exemplary celibate Hindu masculinity; second, the conceptualization of a segmented and exclusionary freedom, unencumbered…
Disease and the Untouchable: Insights from Vernacular Histories of North India
This article delves into the connections between disease, contagion, caste, gender and religion in colonial North India. It looks at the ‘Untouchable’ not just as a figure or a category but as a concept that is utilised by dominant sections to deal with disease, contact zones and social distancing in society. The article focuses on select perceptions in popular Hindi print culture of the early twentieth century, which normalised exclusionary term…
Communal Geographies: An Introduction
This paper introduces a special section comprising eight papers that delve into complex geographies of communal identities in modern South Asia. It situates these papers at a significant intersection of spatial histories and historical geographies of the region, with a focus on exploring the intricate relationship between community and religious identity on the one hand, and space and scale on the other. We take a broad view of communal geographi…
UCred: Fusion of machine learning and deep learning methods for user credibility on social media
Gendering and Vernacularizing Conversions in India: Christianity, Clothing, and Cartoons
This essay examines varied perceptions of Christian missionaries, upper-caste Hindu reformers, and Dalits regarding religious conversions to Christianity, particularly by Dalit women, in colonial India. Simultaneously, it also converses with some of the works on US Christianity, to reflect on how transnational studies can enrich our understanding about religion in the Americas and expand our archival arenas. In the process, the essay contemplates…
Hindu Communism’: Satyabhakta, apocalypses and utopian Ram Rajya
In the north India of 1920s–30s, many first-generation anticolonial communists and Left intellectuals did not see any contradiction in reliance upon religion, ethical traditions and morality in a search for vocabularies of dignity, equality, just polity and social liberation. Through select writings in Hindi of Satyabhakta (1897–85), an almost forgotten figure in histories of communism in India, this article focuses on the entanglement between re…
Women, gender and sexuality: Changing historiographies of colonial India—A bibliographical essay
Drawing on fragmentary examples from women’s histories in colonial India, this paper underlines the problems and possibilities in historiographies of modern India. Feminist scholars argue that the three terms—women, gender and sex—have often been used interchangeably. However, the commonsensical term woman is neither a natural category (of non-men) nor a homogeneous community (of sisterhood), for there are historically many ways of being a woman …
Malleability of the Vernacular: Personal Anecdotes
When I began my doctoral research in 1996, I was keen to explore the interface between Hindu nationalism, sexuality and gender in early twentieth century north India. What soon bothered me was that
Literary Sentiments in the Vernacular: Gender and Genre in Modern South Asia
This collection brings together nine essays, accompanied by nine short translations, that redraw the boundaries of literary histories both temporally and spatially. The essays, rooted in the humanities and informed by interdisciplinary area studies, explore multiple linkages between forms of print culture, linguistic identities and diverse vernacular literary spaces in colonial and post-colonial South Asia. The essays and translations foreground …
Masculine Vernacular Histories of Travel in Colonial India: The Writings of Satyadev ‘Parivrajak’
This article focuses on vernacular travel writings on America and Europe by Swami Satyadev ‘Parivrajak’ (1879–1961), one of the first persons to systematically write travelogues in Hindi. I argue that Parivrajak’s travel literature was part of a colonised nation’s attempt to reclaim a space of freedom, forged through the carving of ‘perfect masculine bodies’, which embodied his ideals of beauty and pleasure. It was a performative, political act t…
Vernacular Sexology from the Margins: A Woman and a Shudra
This article centres on the Hindi sexology writings of a woman, Yashoda Devi, and a Shudra, Santram B.A. In the context of an efflorescence of vernacular sexology literature in early twentieth-century North India, it explicates how their writings moved along different registers, whereby they envisaged a heterosexual ethics that relied on utopian and dystopian descriptions of modernity. Sexology in Hindi, particularly when construed from the margi…
Cast(e)ing and translating sex in the vernacular: The writings of Santram BA in Hindi
Santram BA (1887–1998), a Shudra caste reformer, wrote several articles and books in Hindi on sex and birth control, including translations of Mary Stopes’ writings, in the early twentieth century. This article places Santram’s vernacular writings in a larger historical context of the growth of print, which facilitated the widespread production of so-called obscene material as a commodity. Santram’s writings not only contribute in creating an arc…
Domestic Anxieties, Recalcitrant Intimacies: Representation of Servants in Hindi Print Culture of Colonial India
This essay presents a social history of power relations between domestic workers and their employers by examining the representations of servants in a wide array of Hindi print literature, including didactic manuals, popular magazines, reformist writings and cartoons, in the early twentieth-century North India. Exploring possibilities within repertoires of representation, it navigates how a contentious discourse around servant and employer develo…
Speaking Self , Writing Caste: Recovering the Life of Santram BA
Through the life writing of Santram BA (1887–1998), a veteran Hindi writer and radical caste social reformer from Punjab, this essay illuminates a social history of caste in North India. Santram started writing in 1912 and published more than eighty books, including his memoir Mere Jeevan ke Anubhav . While Santram has remained on the margins of academic scholarship, the essay underlines that his life narrative produced multiple meanings of caste…
My Birth is My Fatal Accident: Introduction to Caste and Life Narratives
Life narratives ranging from autobiographies and biographies to blogs and pictorial art have historically played a vital role in both the affirmation as well as interrogation of caste identities. However, serious study of life narratives in relationship to caste is still relatively underdeveloped. The scholarship on caste (or the varna-jati complex) is vast, as is the study of life narratives as a genre—it is the conjunction of the two that espec…
Allegories of “Love Jihad” and Ghar Vāpasī: Interlocking the Socio-Religious with the Political
In modern India, the year 2014 was marked by the ascendency of Hindu nationalist forces in politics. At a subterranean level, it was also witness to cries of “love jihad” and ghar vāpasī. “Love jihad” was alleged to be a movement aimed at forcibly converting vulnerable Hindu women to Islam through trickery and marriage and ghar vāpasī was a metaphor deployed by the Hindu Right to prevent religious conversions out of Hinduism and to simultaneously…
Embodying Resistance: Representing Dalits in Colonial India
Extending the paradigms of Subaltern Studies, this paper takes up three disparate sites—didactic Hindi literature, conversions and army discourses—to provide a perspective on the disjunctive forms of representation that signified Dalit bodies in colonial north India. Through different arenas, it shows how representations constituted, and were reflective of, the power relationships between upper and lower castes, in which the former reinstated the…
Dalit women as victims: Iconographies of Suffering, Sympathy and Subservience
This article explores how, in a section of upper-caste reformist writings in Hindi, in colonial north India, Dalit women came to be dominantly represented as victims. Images of the permanently polluted, evil and grotesque Dalit woman's body gave way to images of her suffering body, which came together in iconographies of sentimentality, sympathy and subservience. This shift in representation of Dalit women – from polluting to victimised, and lasc…
Innocent' Victims/'Guilty' Migrants: Hindi public sphere, caste and indentured women in colonial North India
This 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 cam…
Feminine, criminal or manly: Imaging Dalit masculinities in colonial north India
This article places the Dalit male body at its centre, and in the process disturbs the idea of masculinity in colonial India. It argues that ways in which caste, Dalit identities and masculinity relate to each other have not been readily recognised, in spite of a growing body of work on Dalits in the colonial period. The article explores how the Dalit male body was socially constructed, or belied, by colonial authorities, by upper castes and by D…
(Im)possible Love and Sexual Pleasure in Late-Colonial North India
This paper explores how unconventional love was written about and expressed in late colonial north India, with special emphasis on Uttar Pradesh (then known as the United Provinces, hereafter UP), in literary genres, print media and in actual practices. It focuses on male-male sexual bondings in an urban climate, relationships between the younger brother-in-law and elder sister-in-law and inter-religious love. Historians of colonial India have em…
Intimate Desires: Dalit Women and Religious Conversions in Colonial India
Religious conversions by Dalits in colonial India have largely been examined as mass movements to Christianity, with an implicit focus on men. However, why did Dalit women convert? Were they just guided by their men, family, and community? This paper explores the interrelationship between caste and gender in Dalit conversions afresh through the use of popular print culture, vernacular missionary literature, writings of Hindu publicists and caste …
Innocent' Victims/'Guilty' Migrants: Hindi public sphere, caste and indentured women in colonial North India
This 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 cam…
Procreation and Pleasure: Writings of a Woman Ayurvedic Practitioner in Colonial North India
This article questions neat dichotomies between subaltern/hegemonic and feminine/masculine, which are often made while examining the impact of modern, Western, biomedical systems on traditional, indigenous medical practices in colonial societies. It does so by studying the extensive writings of Yashoda Devi, a famous woman ayurvedic practitioner in north India at the beginning of the twentieth century. It is unfortunate that this remarkable ayurv…
Communal constructions: Media Reality vs Real Reality
Les AA. rappellent que les conflits politiques, les antagonismes entre les differentes communautes religieuses font partie integrante de l'histoire de l'Inde. Ils s'interessent plus particulierement au mouvement nationaliste hindou : l'« Hindutva » qui soutient que l'Inde est un pays hindou. Ceux-ci, a ce titre, manifestent une grande hostilite a l'encontre de la communaute musulmane de ce pays. Les AA. estiment que la droite indienne vise a rest…
Hindu women, Muslim men: Cleavages in shared spaces of everyday life, United Provinces, c. 1890-1930
Dalit women as victims: Iconographies of Suffering, Sympathy and Subservience
This article explores how, in a section of upper-caste reformist writings in Hindi, in colonial north India, Dalit women came to be dominantly represented as victims. Images of the permanently polluted, evil and grotesque Dalit woman's body gave way to images of her suffering body, which came together in iconographies of sentimentality, sympathy and subservience. This shift in representation of Dalit women – from polluting to victimised, and lasc…
Rethinking South Asian Diaspora Studies
Speaking Self , Writing Caste: Recovering the Life of Santram BA
Through the life writing of Santram BA (1887–1998), a veteran Hindi writer and radical caste social reformer from Punjab, this essay illuminates a social history of caste in North India. Santram started writing in 1912 and published more than eighty books, including his memoir Mere Jeevan ke Anubhav . While Santram has remained on the margins of academic scholarship, the essay underlines that his life narrative produced multiple meanings of caste…
Bonded Bodies: Coastal Fisherfolk, Everyday Migrations, and National Anxieties in India and Sri Lanka
This article is about the tragic journeys and livelihood insecurities of coastal fisherfolk of India and Sri Lanka, who are arrested and jailed by these countries for having entered each other's arenas. These fisherfolk are victims of defined and undefined boundaries in the seas, and increasing conflicts over renewable resources. The article questions the cartographic and border anxieties of these countries, which come into fundamental contradict…
Portrayal of Women in Premchand's Stories: A Critique
Communal Geographies: An Introduction
This paper introduces a special section comprising eight papers that delve into complex geographies of communal identities in modern South Asia. It situates these papers at a significant intersection of spatial histories and historical geographies of the region, with a focus on exploring the intricate relationship between community and religious identity on the one hand, and space and scale on the other. We take a broad view of communal geographi…
Vernacular Sexology from the Margins: A Woman and a Shudra
This article centres on the Hindi sexology writings of a woman, Yashoda Devi, and a Shudra, Santram B.A. In the context of an efflorescence of vernacular sexology literature in early twentieth-century North India, it explicates how their writings moved along different registers, whereby they envisaged a heterosexual ethics that relied on utopian and dystopian descriptions of modernity. Sexology in Hindi, particularly when construed from the margi…
Domestic Anxieties, Recalcitrant Intimacies: Representation of Servants in Hindi Print Culture of Colonial India
This essay presents a social history of power relations between domestic workers and their employers by examining the representations of servants in a wide array of Hindi print literature, including didactic manuals, popular magazines, reformist writings and cartoons, in the early twentieth-century North India. Exploring possibilities within repertoires of representation, it navigates how a contentious discourse around servant and employer develo…
My Birth is My Fatal Accident: Introduction to Caste and Life Narratives
Life narratives ranging from autobiographies and biographies to blogs and pictorial art have historically played a vital role in both the affirmation as well as interrogation of caste identities. However, serious study of life narratives in relationship to caste is still relatively underdeveloped. The scholarship on caste (or the varna-jati complex) is vast, as is the study of life narratives as a genre—it is the conjunction of the two that espec…
Embodying Resistance: Representing Dalits in Colonial India
Extending the paradigms of Subaltern Studies, this paper takes up three disparate sites—didactic Hindi literature, conversions and army discourses—to provide a perspective on the disjunctive forms of representation that signified Dalit bodies in colonial north India. Through different arenas, it shows how representations constituted, and were reflective of, the power relationships between upper and lower castes, in which the former reinstated the…
Dirty' Hindi Literature: Contests About Obscenity in Late Colonial North India
Portrayal of Women in Premchand's Stories: A Critique
Protein quality of formulated home made weaning foods
The protein quality of two Indian home made weaning mixtures developed from locally available foods such as pearl millet (Pennisetum typhoideum), barley (Hordeum vulgare), green gram (Vigna radiata L.), amaranth grain (Amaranthus sp.) and jaggery (unrefined brown sugar) using household technologies like roasting and malting was assessed. Weaning mixtures were comparable to Cerelac, a commercial weaning food. Weaning mixtures had protein efficienc…
Communal constructions: Media Reality vs Real Reality
Les AA. rappellent que les conflits politiques, les antagonismes entre les differentes communautes religieuses font partie integrante de l'histoire de l'Inde. Ils s'interessent plus particulierement au mouvement nationaliste hindou : l'« Hindutva » qui soutient que l'Inde est un pays hindou. Ceux-ci, a ce titre, manifestent une grande hostilite a l'encontre de la communaute musulmane de ce pays. Les AA. estiment que la droite indienne vise a rest…
Dirty' Hindi Literature: Contests About Obscenity in Late Colonial North India
Hindu women, Muslim men: Cleavages in shared spaces of everyday life, United Provinces, c. 1890-1930
Sexuality, Obscenity, Community: Women, Muslims, and the Hindu Public in Colonial India
Through analysis of an impressive array of 'low' and 'high' Hindu literatures, particularly pamphlets, tracts, newspapers, and archival data, Gupta explores the emerging discourse of gender and sexual
(Im)possible Love and Sexual Pleasure in Late-Colonial North India
This paper explores how unconventional love was written about and expressed in late colonial north India, with special emphasis on Uttar Pradesh (then known as the United Provinces, hereafter UP), in literary genres, print media and in actual practices. It focuses on male-male sexual bondings in an urban climate, relationships between the younger brother-in-law and elder sister-in-law and inter-religious love. Historians of colonial India have em…
Procreation and Pleasure: Writings of a Woman Ayurvedic Practitioner in Colonial North India
This article questions neat dichotomies between subaltern/hegemonic and feminine/masculine, which are often made while examining the impact of modern, Western, biomedical systems on traditional, indigenous medical practices in colonial societies. It does so by studying the extensive writings of Yashoda Devi, a famous woman ayurvedic practitioner in north India at the beginning of the twentieth century. It is unfortunate that this remarkable ayurv…
Rethinking South Asian Diaspora Studies
Bonded Bodies: Coastal Fisherfolk, Everyday Migrations, and National Anxieties in India and Sri Lanka
This article is about the tragic journeys and livelihood insecurities of coastal fisherfolk of India and Sri Lanka, who are arrested and jailed by these countries for having entered each other's arenas. These fisherfolk are victims of defined and undefined boundaries in the seas, and increasing conflicts over renewable resources. The article questions the cartographic and border anxieties of these countries, which come into fundamental contradict…
(MIS) Representing the Dalit Woman: Reification of Caste and Gender Stereotypes in the Hindi Didactic Literature of Colonial India
This paper explores the complex social and literary narratives that functioned in the name of the Dalit woman in late colonial north India. It does so by scrutinizing a literary genre of the period, namely didactic literature and domestic manuals in Hindi, which principally addressed themselves to middle class, high caste Hindu women. However, this paper examines ways in which Dalit women got represented in this literature, as that became a poten…
Immigrants and Organ Sharing: A One-Way Street
Organs for transplant represent the extreme example of scarce resources in high demand. Because organ allocation decisions determine who lives and who dies, accusations of unethical transplant distribution practices raise public concern and directly impact organ donation rates. In 1984, the National Organ Transplantation Act defined organs as a "scarce public resource," the distribution of which should be governed "by criteria based on need, effe…
Feminine, criminal or manly: Imaging Dalit masculinities in colonial north India
This article places the Dalit male body at its centre, and in the process disturbs the idea of masculinity in colonial India. It argues that ways in which caste, Dalit identities and masculinity relate to each other have not been readily recognised, in spite of a growing body of work on Dalits in the colonial period. The article explores how the Dalit male body was socially constructed, or belied, by colonial authorities, by upper castes and by D…
Purifying Empire: Obscenity and the Politics of Moral Regulation in Britain, India and Australia, by Deana Heath
Journal Article Purifying Empire: Obscenity and the Politics of Moral Regulation in Britain, India and Australia, by Deana Heath Get access Purifying Empire: Obscenity and the Politics of Moral Regulation in Britain, India and Australia, by Deana Heath (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 2010; pp. 238. £55). Charu Gupta Charu Gupta University of Delhi [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The English …
Intimate Desires: Dalit Women and Religious Conversions in Colonial India
Religious conversions by Dalits in colonial India have largely been examined as mass movements to Christianity, with an implicit focus on men. However, why did Dalit women convert? Were they just guided by their men, family, and community? This paper explores the interrelationship between caste and gender in Dalit conversions afresh through the use of popular print culture, vernacular missionary literature, writings of Hindu publicists and caste …
Embodying Resistance: Representing Dalits in Colonial India
Extending the paradigms of Subaltern Studies, this paper takes up three disparate sites—didactic Hindi literature, conversions and army discourses—to provide a perspective on the disjunctive forms of representation that signified Dalit bodies in colonial north India. Through different arenas, it shows how representations constituted, and were reflective of, the power relationships between upper and lower castes, in which the former reinstated the…
Dalit women as victims: Iconographies of Suffering, Sympathy and Subservience
This article explores how, in a section of upper-caste reformist writings in Hindi, in colonial north India, Dalit women came to be dominantly represented as victims. Images of the permanently polluted, evil and grotesque Dalit woman's body gave way to images of her suffering body, which came together in iconographies of sentimentality, sympathy and subservience. This shift in representation of Dalit women – from polluting to victimised, and lasc…
Innocent' Victims/'Guilty' Migrants: Hindi public sphere, caste and indentured women in colonial North India
This 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 cam…
Allegories of “Love Jihad” and Ghar Vāpasī: Interlocking the Socio-Religious with the Political
In modern India, the year 2014 was marked by the ascendency of Hindu nationalist forces in politics. At a subterranean level, it was also witness to cries of “love jihad” and ghar vāpasī. “Love jihad” was alleged to be a movement aimed at forcibly converting vulnerable Hindu women to Islam through trickery and marriage and ghar vāpasī was a metaphor deployed by the Hindu Right to prevent religious conversions out of Hinduism and to simultaneously…
Speaking Self , Writing Caste: Recovering the Life of Santram BA
Through the life writing of Santram BA (1887–1998), a veteran Hindi writer and radical caste social reformer from Punjab, this essay illuminates a social history of caste in North India. Santram started writing in 1912 and published more than eighty books, including his memoir Mere Jeevan ke Anubhav . While Santram has remained on the margins of academic scholarship, the essay underlines that his life narrative produced multiple meanings of caste…
My Birth is My Fatal Accident: Introduction to Caste and Life Narratives
Life narratives ranging from autobiographies and biographies to blogs and pictorial art have historically played a vital role in both the affirmation as well as interrogation of caste identities. However, serious study of life narratives in relationship to caste is still relatively underdeveloped. The scholarship on caste (or the varna-jati complex) is vast, as is the study of life narratives as a genre—it is the conjunction of the two that espec…
Domestic Anxieties, Recalcitrant Intimacies: Representation of Servants in Hindi Print Culture of Colonial India
This essay presents a social history of power relations between domestic workers and their employers by examining the representations of servants in a wide array of Hindi print literature, including didactic manuals, popular magazines, reformist writings and cartoons, in the early twentieth-century North India. Exploring possibilities within repertoires of representation, it navigates how a contentious discourse around servant and employer develo…
Cast(e)ing and translating sex in the vernacular: The writings of Santram BA in Hindi
Santram BA (1887–1998), a Shudra caste reformer, wrote several articles and books in Hindi on sex and birth control, including translations of Mary Stopes’ writings, in the early twentieth century. This article places Santram’s vernacular writings in a larger historical context of the growth of print, which facilitated the widespread production of so-called obscene material as a commodity. Santram’s writings not only contribute in creating an arc…
Women, gender and sexuality: Changing historiographies of colonial India—A bibliographical essay
Drawing on fragmentary examples from women’s histories in colonial India, this paper underlines the problems and possibilities in historiographies of modern India. Feminist scholars argue that the three terms—women, gender and sex—have often been used interchangeably. However, the commonsensical term woman is neither a natural category (of non-men) nor a homogeneous community (of sisterhood), for there are historically many ways of being a woman …
Malleability of the Vernacular: Personal Anecdotes
When I began my doctoral research in 1996, I was keen to explore the interface between Hindu nationalism, sexuality and gender in early twentieth century north India. What soon bothered me was that
Political science (27 works) · Sociology (27 works) · Gender Studies (25 works) · Law (24 works) · Art (20 works) · History (20 works) · Law (18 works) · Gender Studies (17 works) · Philosophy (16 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (15 works)