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"Women, Gender and History in India examines Indian history through a thematic lens of women and gender across different contexts. Through an inter-disciplinary approach, Nita Kumar uses sources from literature, folklore, religion, and art to discuss historical and anthropological ways of interpreting the issues surrounding women and gender in history. As part of the scholarly movement away from a Grand Narrative of South Asian history and culture, this volume places emphasis on the diversity of women and their experiences. It does this by including analyses of many different primary sources together with discussion around a wide variety of theoretical and methodological debates - from the mixed role of colonial law and education, to the conundrum of a patriarchy that worships the Goddess while it strives to keep women in subservience. This textbook is essential reading for those studying Indian history and women and gender studies"--

Frontmatter -- Contents -- List of Figures -- List of Tables -- Preface -- Note on Translation -- Abbreviations -- Introduction -- 1. The Artisans of Banaras -- 2. The Question of Identity -- 3. The Banaras of the Artisans -- 4. The Outer Side -- 5. The Body and Its Pleasures -- 6. The Artisans' World of Music -- 7. Cutting Off the Nose, and Other Obscenities -- 8. More on the Question of Identity -- Conclusion -- Appendix A -- Appendix B -- Glossary -- Bibliography -- Index

From July 1981 to April 1983, I kept a diary in the field, making entries whenever loneliness and frustration seemed to reach a peak, or I was consumed by self-pity at the hopelessness of my task, or less often, when I simply wanted to express myself about something remarkable, or rarer still, to exult in a special triumph. I should add that scribbling is a habit for me diary-like, essay-like scribbling but one which constitutes an end in itself. To make it public needs some justification. I harbor an academic bias against the tendency toward vulgarization, the notion that a personal experience can be elevated to the status of a universal one.

Faisal Devji, The Impossible Indian: Gandhi and the Temptation of Violence, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012, pp. 191.

ANJAN GHOSH, TAPATI GUHA-THAKURTA AND JANAKI NAIR, eds, Theorizing the Present: Essays for Partha Chatterjee, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2011, pp. 322.

'Provincialism', or the separation of inferior spaces from normative ones, is seen in this essay as a key trope for interpreting modern Indian history. Provincialism, or provinciality, is a space recognizable instantly. It is marked by slowness, by absence of the new and recent, by what is seen on the national level as a brake-effect in an otherwise promising march forwards. Cities, which is what I concentrate on in this essay, are characterizable as provincial by a certain appearance: a topography of narrow streets, by the sloppy merger of the inside and outside, by an absence of discrimination between the jungle and the civilized as animal life proliferates on the roads. Their space is marked by a lack of discipline, and this lack is further exacerbated by an attitude almost aggressive, at any rate stubborn, that seems to embrace every other dimension of life. The provincial citizen is one whose body identifies with the provincial space. It revels in an indifference to the rules of obedience to arbitrary external exercises of power. The provincial space and its citizen are marked in the use of languages by the dominance of regional language over English. Overall, the provincial space is signified in the state as an obstacle, political, economic, and most of all cultural, to what could otherwise be the smooth march forward of unfettered forces of rationality and order. But it signifies itself by an alternative code. That which is indiscipline to the center is freedom to the margins; that which is coarse, is cultured; that which is backward, is rich; that which is alien is intimate; and that which is unable to keep step with a march forward is precisely the intelligent and crafty that refuses to play a non-reflexive, mechanical game.

This essay brings together and complicates three stories within South Asian education history by gendering them. Thus modern education was actively pursued by mothers for their sons; indigenous education should be understood as continuing at home; and women were crucial actors in men's reform and nationalism efforts through both collaboration and resistance. Gendered history should go beyond the separate story of girls and women, or the understanding of women as mothers and mothers as the nation, to see these three processes as gendered. The paper argues for the coming together of historical and anthropological arguments and for using literature imaginatively.