Nita Kumar

Women as subjects : South Asian histories

Womens Speech Genres, Kinship and the Contradiction, Gloria Goodwin Raheja Power and Violence - Hindu Images of Female Fury, Ann Grodzins Gold Between Two Worlds - Self-Construction and Self-Identity in the Writings of Three 19th-century Indian Christian Women, Leslie E. Flemming Other Voices, Other Rooms - the View from the Zenana, Gail Minault Killing My Hearts Desire - Education and Female Autonomy in Rural North India, Patricia Jeffery and Roger Jeffery Gender and Politics in Garhwal, William Sax Oranges for the Girls or the Half-Known Story of the Education of Girls in 20th-century Banaras, Nita Kimar.

Lessons from schools : the history of education in Banaras

Introduction The Politics of Education The End of Sanskrit Education The Rationality of Merchants The Creation of a New Indian Identity The Rationality of Artisans The Strength of Women Educators and the Weakness of History Conclusion Lessons from School

Class and gender politics in the Ramlila

While debating between different titles for this paper, I found myself struggling to keep ’Ramlila’ out of the name. For m.~ my paper was about serious things: gender categories and their sustenance, political domination and resistance, negotiated constitutions of rationality and decency; not, as might seem from a title ’Ramlila’, about a traditional performance in dusty spaces repeating a familiar, reactionary myth. The recognition of my dilemma was followed by the realisation that there was a polemic I wished to be engaged in, with which I shall begin. As with most developments in scholarship, we show a rather explicit pattern of following the West in our new regard for culture in history writings. Thompson expressed envy some fifteen years ago regarding the fact that we Indians were liberally surrounded by people’s oral traditions,, genres, performances, creations, whereas a social historian of England would be overjoyed to discover in his career one song that had not been studied before. Given the continued productivity and richness of people’s traditional (in the non-technical sense of from the past) culture all around us, the fact that we have such few historians of work, leisure, family, ritual, everyday life, popular literature and consciousness can only be attributed to the processes of academic reproduction in institutions self-willingly isolated from surrounding reality. Without a desire to suggest international competition or nationalist signatures to history writing, I would like to express my confidence that now that culture and everyday life is coming to be taken seriously by historians in the West, it will progressively come to be seen as important here. My own work on popular culture2 was based on an (insufficiently

India’s Trials with Citizenship, Modernisation and Nationhood

A succession of governors-general of the East India Company, from Warren Hastings to Lord Dalhousie, expanded and consolidated the company’s territories in India between 1772 and 1857. The officials put new revenue and legal structures in place, based, as they surmised, on some continuing legacies of Mughal and provincial rule. They intervened in the technological processes of the subcontinent, introducing new transport, communication, irrigation, and banking measures. Then, beginning in the 1830s, escalating into the 1850s, they intervened in the educational structures in a formal and deliberate way.

The “Ramlila Project”

The “Ramlila Project” was undertaken by a team of 12 people from June to December 2007, with the aim of teaching children from a neighborhood in the city of Varanasi, North India, the characteristics and advantages of modernity and globalization using local history and arts.1 I was part of the team from June to late August, as a historian and concept-developer, and then as the report-writer and commentator on the success of the project. I discuss it in this essay through an examination of two identity formations. One is the identity of the local people who seek globalization, but such is the power of the local-global dichotomy that they also resist it. The second identity is that of the activist-reformers, for whom the challenge is to develop a strategy and an image that can go beyond the perilous tradition-modernity dichotomy that neither reflects reality nor constructs a positive future for anyone by positing such a simple conflict.

Book Reviews : MICHAEL R. ANDERSON and SUMIT GUHA, eds, Changing Concepts of Rights and Justice in South Asia, New Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1998, pp. 288

to the significance of ’lived experience’; to the gap in the social history of law; and to the challenge of viewing ’rights’ as part of a ’culture’, represented by some, silencing others. The 11 papers in the volume then proceed to present evidence for interpretations that can move beyond dichotomies and abstractions. The first essay, ’Wrongs and Rights in the Maratha Country’, by Sumit Guha, grapples with the historical evidence on eighteenth-century Maharashtra, focusing on the generalisations about social practices generated from this. We do not get a conclusive answer, but we do get interesting examples of how antiquity, caste, age, gender and of course economic power worked to construct and protect norms. The empty category of ’custom’, then, gets enriched with social and historical depths. These are only suggested in this essay, and a reader naturally will regard this as a piece of a larger work. Radhika Singha’s essay on colonial justice in the Banaras zamindari at the end of the eighteenth century, by contrast, is a detailed exposition with copious footnotes, drawn from her dissertation. The complexities of the interplay between social status and the equalising ideology of British law, leading to a threat to elite privileges, on the one hand, and a new marginalisation of certain poor and low castes on the other, are examined minutely. Sandria Freitag looks at Sansiahs, a peripatetic group of ’wanderers’ to delineate the triangular interaction of the British state, the local elite and the Sansiahs themselves. Her conclusion is that this was a

Book Reviews : Jamal Malik, Colonialization of Islam: Dissolution of Traditional Institutions in Pakistan, Delhi, Manohar, 1996, pp. 349:

As the goal of a European community moves steadily towards realisation, the notions of nation, nation-state and nationalism have come under critical scrutiny. The ’constructed’ or ’imagined’ character of these concepts has been emphasised and secular forces (capitalism, industrialisation, printed books, secularisation, etc.) have been presented as the key variables in their emergence. Adrian Hastings, a distinguished historian of Christianity, challenges the secularist position, particularly in the form presented by Eric Hobsbawm. He maintains that nations, nation-states and nationalism go far back in time, beyond the late eighteenth century. He writes that the Bible presented ’in Israel itself a developed model of what it means to be a nation-a unity of people, language, religion, territory and government’ (p. 18). The significance of the availability of the Bible for translation’Christianity never had a sacred language’, (p. 194), and the doings of the local clergy.resulting in the fostering of ‘a sense of shared local, provincial or national identity’ (p. 192), Hastings says, should not be ignored. Indeed, he tried to set the record straight in an erudite and readable manner. He also discusses development in England in the medieval period which, according to him, provide a ’prototype’. The South Slavs and some African case studies extend the discussion beyond

Girls' Schooling, Women's Autonomy and Fertility Change in South Asia@@@Hope or Despair? Learning in Pakistan's Primary Schools

Primary Schools in Pakistan Students: Enrollment, Achievement, and Completion Teachers: Supply, Morale, and Quality Teacher Training: Value Added or Money Wasted? Gender and Achievement School Buildings, Textbooks, and Supplies School Organization: Administration, Management, or Leadership? Explaining Student Achievement Educational Innovations: Cases and Lessons From Failure to Success Index

Book Reviews : VASUDHA DALMIA, The Nationalization of Hindu Traditions: Bharatendu Harischandra andNineteenth-centuryBanaras, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1997, pp. xii + 490, Rs 575

Scholarship on Banaras is typically of two kinds: one that is dominated by the ’holy city’ image or that otherwise finds Banaras extraordinary, and the other that uses it almost casually as a site for exemplifying a broader argument, such as regarding communalism, historiography or modernisation. Dalmia’s strength lies in that she escapes both these extremes, and presents a narrative of social history rooted in the city but without mystifying it. Her weakness lies partly in that she does not adequately read the textuality of the city and takes many ’facts’ at face value. The beginning of the book is not as eloquent as the rest of it. Dalmia engages in, as she describes it, ’a lengthy tussle’ with others’ theses, which leaves one unaroused since we have not yet been familiarised with Dalmi~s