Women In Indian History

Papers presented at a Seminar on Women in Indian History : Social, Economic, Political, and Cultural Perspectives, organized by Dept. of History, Panjab University, Chandīgarh in February 1992, and sponsored by Indian Council of Historical Research.

Looks at Indian history from ancient to modern times revealing precisely why ideas of gender rights were not static across eras or regions. Integrates women's issues, roles, and achievements into the general study of the times, providing a clear presentation of the social, cultural, religious, political, and economic realities that have helped shape the identity of Indian women. With a focus on gender and female sexuality in terms of representations in male texts of the premodern era; their later use by men and women for contemporary social and political purposes; women's narratives in their social contexts; and the issues of female agency and objectification, addresses women's subordinate nature in India, but also their active resistance, avenues for self-expression, negotiations with patriarchy, and support of oppressive traditions.

In this study of British middle-class feminism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Antoinette Burton explores an important but neglected historical dimension of the relationship between feminism and imperialism. Demonstrating how feminists in the United Kingdom appropriated imperialistic ideology and rhetoric to justify their own right to equality, she reveals a variety of feminisms grounded in notions of moral and racial superiority. According to Burton, Victorian and Edwardian feminists such as Josephine Butler, Millicent Garrett Fawcett, and Mary Carpenter believed that the native women of colonial India constituted a special 'white woman's burden.' Although there were a number of prominent Indian women in Britain as well as in India working toward some of the same goals of equality, British feminists relied on images of an enslaved and primitive 'Oriental womanhood' in need of liberation at the hands of their emancipated British 'sisters.' Burton argues that this unquestioning acceptance of Britain's imperial status and of Anglo-Saxon racial superiority created a set of imperial feminist ideologies, the legacy of which must be recognized and understood by contemporary feminists.

Co-published by Routledge and Edition Synapse, this new title makes key archival source material readily available to scholars, researchers, and students of Indian imperial history. The collection will be particularly welcomed by those working in women's and gender studies, and in women's history, but also by those active in allied and related fields. Selected and introduced by an expert editor, the gathered materials are reproduced in facsimile, giving users a strong sense of immediacy to the texts and permitting citation to the original pagination. Women in Colonial India is a veritable treasure-trove; it brings together key colonial documents and other materials which are currently widely dispersed or very difficult for scholars, researchers, and students across the globe to locate and use. In five volumes, the collection draws on a wide variety of sources, including periodicals, memoirs, parliamentary, and administrative reports. It covers crucial gendered concerns and topics, such as 'the woman question'; female infanticide; widow-burning; education; health; and marriage. Each volume is supplemented by a substantial introduction, newly written by the learned editor, which contextualizes the collected works, and this vital reference and research resource also includes a detailed appendix providing data on the provenance of the gathered works.

Since the mid-1970s gender has been introduced as a fundamental category of social, cultural and historical reality, perception and study. Social history is becoming more intelligible through recent studies on women. Women are no longer invisible in history. This monograph marks a welcome recognition of the importance of situating women's history within the broader perspective of social history, and illustrates the wide variety of themes in women's history on which historians have been working over the last few decades. The essays in this monograph have been written with great insight and bear ample evidence of painstaking research.

Women Warriors in Indian History explores the life of ten Indian women warriors as narrated by other historical characters. While Italian traveller Marco Polo recounts the story of his contemporary Queen Rudramba, Emperor Jahangir narrates the tale of Durgavati to his future consort. Legendary Tatya Tope unfolds Avantibai's heroics to Lakshmi Bai and the eunuch General Malik Kafur regales a young sultan with Raziya Sultana's exploits. Put together chronologically, from the slave dynasty to the first war of Indian independence, these stories showcase the changing canvas of Indian history. More importantly, the narratives bring forward the exceptional qualities of these women warriors, while fighting against gender, social, religious and political odds and oppositions. They prove that women are unequivocally strong leaders who have waged and won many battles with courage and conviction down the ages. Well-researched and engagingly narrated, this book familiarizes readers with these extraordinary women, their highs and lows and provides a glimpse into their unique, yet relatively less known lives.

The ten essays which make up the body of this book are drawn from a wide variety of disciplines and weave a complex pattern of the experiences of women in India over the last one hundred years. The book departs from traditional historiography which has given inadequate attention to women, and in this sense From the Seams of History attempts to 'rewrite' history. Beginning with the debate on widow remarriage in Bengal and Haryana, the book moves on to examine how the new fashions in clothing of the Bengali 'gentlewomen' in the nineteenth century were tailored according to the values and anxieties of their dominant male counterparts. The argument of male domination is taken further in an essay demonstrating that male oppression of women in Indian society was in fact remarkably similar to that of the colonial masters.

One hundred and forty years before Gerda Lerner established women’s history as a specialized field in 1972, a small group of women began to claim American Indian history as their own domain. A Field of Their Own examines nine key figures in American Indian scholarship to reveal how women came to be identified with Indian history and why they eventually claimed it as their own field. From Helen Hunt Jackson to Angie Debo, the magnitude of their research, the reach of their scholarship, the popularity of their publications, and their close identification with Indian scholarship makes their invisibility as pioneering founders of this specialized field all the more intriguing. Reclaiming this lost history, John M. Rhea looks at the cultural processes through which women were connected to Indian history and traces the genesis of their interest to the nineteenth-century push for women’s rights. In the early 1830s evangelical preachers and women’s rights proponents linked American Indians to white women’s religious and social interests. Later, pre-professional women ethnologists would claim Indians as a special political cause. Helen Hunt Jackson’s 1881 publication, A Century of Dishonor, and Alice Fletcher’s 1887 report, Indian Education and Civilization, foreshadowed the emerging history profession’s objective methodology and established a document-driven standard for later Indian histories. By the twentieth century, historians Emma Helen Blair, Louise Phelps Kellogg, and Annie Heloise Abel, in a bid to boost their professional status, established Indian history as a formal specialized field. However, enduring barriers continued to discourage American Indians from pursuing their own document-driven histories. Cultural and academic walls crumbled in 1919 when Cherokee scholar Rachel Caroline Eaton earned a Ph.D. in American history. Eaton and later Indigenous historians Anna L. Lewis and Muriel H. Wright would each play a crucial role in shaping Angie Debo’s 1940 indictment of European American settler colonialism, And Still the Waters Run. Rhea’s wide-ranging approach goes beyond existing compensatory histories to illuminate the national consequences of women’s century-long predominance over American Indian scholarship. In the process, his thoughtful study also chronicles Indigenous women’s long and ultimately successful struggle to transform the way that historians portray American Indian peoples and their pasts.