Rochona Majumdar

Marriage and modernity : family values in colonial Bengal

An innovative cultural history of the evolution of modern marriage practices in Bengal, Marriage and Modernity challenges the assumption that arranged marriage is an antiquated practice. Rochona Majumdar demonstrates that in the late colonial period Bengali marriage practices underwent changes that led to a valorization of the larger, intergenerational family as a revered, “ancient” social institution, with arranged marriage as the apotheosis of an “Indian” tradition. She meticulously documents the ways that these newly embraced “traditions”—the extended family and arranged marriage—entered into competition and conversation with other emerging forms of kinship such as the modern unit of the couple, with both models participating promiscuously in the new “marketplace” for marriages, where matrimonial advertisements in the print media and the payment of dowry played central roles. Majumdar argues that together the kinship structures newly asserted as distinctively Indian and the emergence of the marriage market constituted what was and still is modern about marriages in India. Majumdar examines three broad developments related to the modernity of arranged marriage: the growth of a marriage market, concomitant debates about consumption and vulgarity in the conduct of weddings, and the legal regulation of family property and marriages. Drawing on matrimonial advertisements, wedding invitations, poems, photographs, legal debates, and a vast periodical literature, she shows that the modernization of families does not necessarily imply a transition from extended kinship to nuclear family structures, or from matrimonial agreements negotiated between families to marriage contracts between individuals. Colonial Bengal tells a very different story.

GANDHI'S GITA AND POLITICS AS SUCH

M. K. Gandhis “Discourses on the Gita,” a series of talks delivered to ashramites at Sabarmati during 1926 and 1927, provides a singular instance in Indian intellectual thought in which the Bhagavad Gitas message of action is transformed into a theory of non-violent resistance. This essay argues that Gandhis reading of the Gita has to be placed within an identifiable general understanding of the political that emerged among the so-called “extremists’ in the Congress towards the beginning of the twentieth century. Gandhi, we argue, wrested from the “Extremists” their vocabulary and their pre-eminent political text, the Gita, and put them to use in the cause of non-violent politics. But, more importantly, his discourses on the Gita after 1920 suggest an acceptance, on his part, of politics as it actually was. This is where he departed from the projects of Tilak or Aurobindo. The Gita, in Gandhis hand, became a talismanic device that allowed the satyagrahi his or her involvement in political action while providing protection from the necessary and unavoidable venality of politics and its propensity to violence.

Debating Radical Cinema: A History of the Film Society Movement in India *

This paper offers a history of the creation and development of film societies in India from 1947 to 1980. Members of the film society movement consisted of important Indian film directors such as Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak, Shyam Benegal, Basu Chatterji, Mani Kaul, G. Aravindan, Kumar Shahani, Adoor Gopalkrishnan, and Mrinal Sen, as well as film enthusiasts, numbering about 100,000 by 1980. The movement, confined though it was to members who considered themselves film aficionados, was propelled by debates similar to those that animated left-oriented cultural movements which originated in late colonial India, namely, the Progressive Writers Association in 1936, and the Indian Peoples Theatre Association in 1942. By looking at the film society movement as an early and sustained attempt at civil-social organization in postcolonial India, this paper highlights the two distinct definitions of ‘good cinema’—from an aesthetically sophisticated product to a radical political text—that were debated during the time of the movement.

SnehalataÌs death: Dowry and womenÌs agency in colonial Bengal

The death of Snehalata Mukhopadhyay in January 1914 remains one of the earliest and most widely discussed cases of dowry related suicides in colonial India. While the fact file on this young woman has until recently remained slim, her name appears in most scholarly accounts of dowry related crimes against women. The first aim of this article is to fill in the details of the Snehalata case. It then attempts to understand why her name acquired an iconic status in early twentieth-century Bengali society. While it is impossible to establish beyond doubt why Snehalata killed herself on that fateful January afternoon, her suicide unarguably incited a discourse about womenÌs agency in contemporary society. In mapping that discourse, this article shows how people read the act of SnehalataÌs suicide to talk about womenÌs roles in public life in new and often contradictory ways.

Feluda on Feluda: a letter to Topshe

ABSTRACT This article is written as a letter by ‘Feluda,’ Satyajit Ray’s detective hero (formally named as Prodosh C. Mitter) to his cousin/assistant Topshe (Tapesh Ranjan Mitter). The choice of format enables the protagonist, Feluda, to make the unorthodox point that it would be a misreading to regard him as a children’s hero. Taking issue with Ray’s own remarks on Feluda, and focusing primarily on the two films, Sonar Kella (Golden Fortress, 1974) and Joi Baba Felunath (The Elephant God, 1979), the article situates Feluda in a discursive universe of contemporary Bengali cinema and its reception. It also draws a longer and more speculative genealogy of the sleuth in the histories of detectives and detective literature. Establishing him as a figure whose appeal crossed over meaningfully to adults, this article makes a case for why and in what ways ‘Feluda’ films made by Satyajit Ray qualified as popular cinema.

Marriage, family, and property in India: the Hindu Succession Act of 1956

The Hindu Succession Act of 1956, one of the first laws relating to property and family enacted by the newly independent government of India, remains in the final analysis an anti-women piece of legislation. This article explores the reasons that forced the hand of the new post-colonial state in that direction. There had been, from the early nineteenth century, a small but influential section of Indian reformers who had argued in favour of granting property rights to women: wives, widows and married daughters. Dr B.R. Ambedkar, one of the chief framers of the Hindu Code Bills, of which the Succession Act was part, as well as Jawaharlal Nehru, the countrys first prime minister, were also strong proponents of womens property rights. Why then were their endeavours defeated in the final legislation? Through an analysis of the debates around the Hindu Succession Act, I argue that the anti-woman nature of the law was inextricably linked to the modernization of Indian families. The latter did not necessarily imply a move from the extended family to nuclear structures or from non-contractual to contractual bonds between individuals. It entailed other kinds of changes and adjustments, often from extended to joint families. The centrality of the family has important implications for thinking about the history of modern property and the propertied subject in the Indian context.

Policing higher education: a historian’s perspective

Political parties have always meddled in the affairs of educational institutions in postindependence India. In West Bengal, the state in which I studied until I completed my BA, the CPIM’s presence in primary, secondary and higher education was palpable. Growing up in Calcutta, I was no stranger to acrimonious debates around governmental interference in academia. For example, the government’s decision to ban the teaching of English in state-funded schools until the fifth standard, political interference in the appointments of teachers, rising levels of campus violence and the dilution of academic standards at institutions that enjoyed a reputation as centres of academic excellence elicited spirited debate in the public sphere. The decisive victory of the Trinamool Congress against the CPIM has not improved matters in academic life but the debates continue. As a seasoned spectator of political interference in campus life, I was nevertheless horrified by the spate of events that have at their centre the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), unarguably among the best liberal arts institutions in India. I would like to note right away that while JNU is currently the eye of the storm that is buffeting higher education in India, it is by no means the only place that has felt its impact. Nor did the tale commence with JNU. As a historian I know it is tricky business to look for a single point of origin to explain a complex phenomenon. Let me mention instead several events that have occurred during the last few years, that, when seen together, demonstrate a certain pattern. I will refrain from naming this pattern as a move towards ‘fascism’ ‘neo-liberalism’, ‘corporatization’ or ‘privatization’. There are numerous currents in play in the contemporary situation that make it both explosive and dynamic. It is important, I think, to build up a descriptive catalogue of events that would then enable us to theorize about it in the future. I will, for now, discuss some select aspects of the current situation by way of understanding better my own growing disquiet as I survey the arena of Indian higher education. I urge readers to see the current crisis as part of a continuum of rising intolerance in the Indian public sphere. Attempts by certain groups to throttle any voice that is dissonant with their own did not begin in 2016. As a political trend, it has been around for some time now. What we confront today is a new mode of expressing power at the expense of other modes. The aim of this descriptive exercise is to lay bare, even if provisionally, the sinews of this constellation of power. Put differently, the frontal attack by the present government on JNU is a finished expression of the crude aggression unleashed on my colleague Wendy Doniger’s book The Hindus. Dinanath Batra, who spearheaded the campaign against Doniger, attributed to her a ‘Christian missionary zeal and hidden agenda to denigrate Hindus’. She was, he wrote, ‘a woman hungry of sex’. Penguin Books India, as we know, decided to pulp Doniger’s book. Doniger’s was only one in a long series of books that have been attacked by the Hindu right in India. I invoke it here as an example that illustrates the current context where academic arguments are seen as unnecessary. We are now at a conjuncture where rules of evidence and civil critique will be rendered banal unless we confront head-on their precarious existence. Despite my awareness of the long-term nature of such phenomena, or indeed their pan-Indian reach, the Delhi police’s arrest of the JNUSU president Kanhaiya Kumar and several other

Art Cinema: The Indian Career of a Global Category

The absence of a sustained analysis of the category of art cinema is sometimes seen as a curious gap in an otherwise rich and expanding body of scholarship on Indian films. Ravi Vasudevan drew attention to this gap in his observation that in recent years, “the ground of public and film-critical attention has shifted, and four areas of Indian cinema have become visible”: popular formats, diaspora productions, international collaborations, and documentary films. “The Indian art film and author cinema,” he added, “continues to be showcased at home and abroad, but has become somewhat marginal both to public discussion and scholarly engagement.” Seldom analyzed, the category of art cinema circulates, however, in writings of commentators in the mainstream media, film critics, state officials, and film studies specialists, who write as if it refers to a definite and distinct set of objects called art films. In such usage, art

Subaltern Studies as a History of Social Movements in India

Subaltern Studies (hereafter SS, 1978–2008), a research collective and series of publications, is not typically associated with history writing on social movements in India. The stated aim of the group was to document the politics of the people during the era of British colonial rule in the subcontinent. Ranajit Guha, the founder of the collective underscored the importance of popular mobilizations to the project when he wrote ‘parallel to the domain of elite politics there existed throughout the colonial period another domain of Indian politics in which the principal actors were not the dominant groups of the indigenous society or the colonial authorities but the subaltern classes and groups constituting the mass of the labouring population and the intermediate strata in town and country—that is the people’.

Arguments within Indian feminism

The books to be discussed in this essay are as follows: Rajeshwari Sunder Rajan, The Scandal of the State: Women, Law, and Citizenship in Postcolonial India (Durham and London, Duke University Press, 2003), xv + 313; Indrani Chatterjee (ed.), Unfamiliar Relations: Family and History in South Asia (New Brunswick and London, Rutgers University Press, 2004), 203; Judith Walsh, Domesticity in Colonial India: What Women Learned When Men Gave Them Advice (Lanham, Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), xviii + 235; Tanika Sarkar, Hindu Wife Hindu Nation: Community, Religion and Cultural Nationalism (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2001), viii + 290; Leela Gandhi, Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-de-Siecle Radicalism and the Politics Of Friendship (Durham and London, Duke University Press, 2006), x + 254; Nivedita Menon, Recovering Subversion: Feminist Politics Beyond The Law (Urbana and Chicago, University of Illinois Press, 2004), xii + 271.