Wives Widows And Concubines

Debates about family, property, and nation in Tamil India

The book examines how the family became the centre of intense debates about identity, community, and nation in colonial Tamil Nadu. Developing ideas about love, marriage and desire were inextricably linked to caste politics, the colonial economy, and nationalist agitation. The book argues that notions of community centred around the changing family were fundamental to shaping national identity in the early twentieth century.

Emlyn Eisenach uses a wide range of sources, including the richly detailed and previously unexplored records of nearly two hundred marriage-related disputes from the bishop’s court of Verona, to illuminate family and social relations in early modern northern Italy. Arguing against the common emphasis on the growth of law and government in this period, her study emphasizes the fluidity of the principles that governed marriage and its dissolution, and deepens our understanding of the patriarchal family and its complex relationship with gender and status during the sixteenth century. Peopled by characters from across the social spectrum of the city of Verona and its contado, Eisenach’s study moves between stories about specific individuals—serving girls seeking honorable marriage through the unlikely route of concubinage, peasant men in search of independence from their fathers, and aristocratic wives seeking revenge against adulterous husbands—and broader analyses of social, economic, and geographical patterns of behavior. She shows how the Veronese at all social levels attempted to better their familial and personal fortunes by creatively molding wedding rituals to fit their particular circumstances, or engaging in the significant but until now little understood practices of concubinage, clandestine marriage, or informal marriage dissolution. Eisenach also evaluates the first half-century of religious reforms in Verona as the leading pre-Tridentine bishop Gian Matteo Giberti and his successors challenged common practices and understandings in sermons, treatises, confessionals, and court. Emphasizing the limitations of what the religious authorities could impose on the people, she explores how learned and popular notions of marriage, family, and gender shaped each other as they were put into action in the strategies of individual Veronese.

This book traces changing gender relations in China from the tenth to fourteenth centuries by examining three critical categories of women: courtesans, concubines, and faithful wives. It shows how the intersection and mutual influence of these groups—and of male discourses about them—transformed ideas about family relations and the proper roles of men and women. Courtesan culture had a profound effect on Song social and family life, as entertainment skills became a defining feature of a new model of concubinage, and as entertainer-concubines increasingly became mothers of literati sons. Neo-Confucianism, the new moral learning of the Song, was significantly shaped by this entertainment culture and by the new markets—in women—that it created. Responding to a broad social consensus, Neo-Confucians called for enhanced recognition of concubine mothers in ritual and expressed increasing concern about wifely jealousy. The book also details the surprising origins of the Late Imperial cult of fidelity, showing that from inception, the drive to celebrate female loyalty was rooted in a complex amalgam of political, social, and moral agendas. By taking women—and men’s relationships with women—seriously, this book makes a case for the centrality of gender relations in the social, political, and intellectual life of the Song and Yuan dynasties.

An impressive collection of writings on women's issues in Indian history

In 1938, noting that the bulk of the Indian population formed a “landless proletariat” and despairing of the ability of the factionalized Indian community to unite in pursuit of common objectives, activist K.A. Neelakanda Ayer forecast that the fate of Indians in Malaya would be to become “Tragic orphans – of whom India has forgotten and Malaya looks down upon with contempt”. Ayer’s words continue to resonate; as a minority group in a nation dominated politically by colonially derived narratives of “race” and ethnicity and riven by the imperatives of religion, the general trajectory of the economically and politically impotent Indian community has been one of increasing irrelevance. This book explores the history of the modern Indian presence in Malaysia, and traces the vital role played by the Indian community in the construction of contemporary Malaysia. In this comprehensive new study, Carl Vadivella Belle offers fresh insights on the Indian experience spanning the period from the colonial recruitment of Indian labour to the post-Merdeka political, economic and social marginalization of Indians. While recent Indian challenges to the political status quo — a regime described as that of “benign neglect” — promoted Indian hopes of reform, change and uplift, the author concludes that the dictates of political discourse permeated by the ideologies of communalism offer limited prospects for meaningful change.

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