Abstract This paper identifies family planning as a key arena of women’s movement activity during the 1950s and early 1960s. Focusing on the All India Women’s Conference (AIWC) and the Family Planning Association of India (FPAI), I argue that organised women helped to make family planning a component of national planning for development. While they joined other policymakers to promote the idea that

Abstract When Parvathi Krishnan (MP, Coimbatore Madras) entered India’s parliament on 28 March 1958, it was just a regular workday. She questioned a government minister about his policies toward railway workers, and solicited funds to repair a post office in her constituency. And yet as a woman legislator, she balanced the everyday tasks of governance with the difficulties of functioning in a male-centred

Abstract This paper examines the life and times of a remarkable twentieth-century figure, Begum Qudsia Aizaz Rasul (1908–2001), the first and only Muslim woman in independent India’s Constituent Assembly which drafted the country’s Constitution. In doing so, it critically engages with the genre of autobiographical writing—the limits it imposed and the particular vantage points it offered. By drawing

Abstract Indian leaders and women’s organisations wanted to ensure that women would participate in and be elected to the legislatures in India’s first elections. Ultimately, however, only a small number of women were selected as candidates, and even fewer were elected to the legislatures. This article explores some of the mechanisms and ways in which this gap emerged in relation to the registration

Abstract This Introduction frames a collection of papers that explore the roles played by women—as volunteers, organisers, bureaucrats, politicians and citizens—in shaping the emerging ideologies and structures of independent India. Although women’s participation is both understudied and inadequately theorised in existing scholarship, the papers in this collection demonstrate that the decades following

Abstract This article investigates the letter-writing manual of the physician Muhammad Yusufi Haravi, composed in the 1530s at the court of the Mughal emperor, Humayun. It argues that by prescribing proper expressions of emotion based on one’s rank, the text reflects a combination of courtly desire and medical expertise which hoped to (but could not) transform the body politic (Mughal elite) into an

Abstract This paper studies the years 1940–42 in Bengal with a view to analysing the social fuel that made the Quit India Movement possible in the province. War-time colonial policies created multiple disruptions and intrusions in the lives of the people of Bengal, building up anxieties and mass discontent. Coupled with widespread rumours, this profoundly reconfigured the image of the colonial state

Abstract Succeeding waves of mobilisation for the separate state of Gorkhaland has left an indelible imprint on the cultural, political and urban landscape of the Darjeeling Hills. Based on empirical research, this paper tries to explore the intricate relationship between ethnicity, place and politics of belonging in the Himalayan town of Kalimpong. It specifically tries to locate the interface between

Abstract The Theravadi Bhikku Kathikawath (Registration) Bill, presented to the parliament of Sri Lanka in January 2016, is a proposed framework for formulating codes of conduct for Buddhist monks. The bill marked an important moment in the politics of Buddhism, as it led to the emergence of competing views among lay and monastic groups over the question of who could introduce monastic reforms. The

Abstract The radical Right in Europe and Islamist parties in Muslim countries have conventionally been portrayed as fundamentally different. The article uses material from Bangladesh to argue that the two share a wide set of characteristics and can be understood as fundamentally similar. Theoretically, we suggest a concept of the radical Right that encapsulates a set of deeper sentiments found to some

Abstract Since its rise in 2014, Islamic State (IS) has attracted more than 30,000 volunteers to take part in the conflicts raging in Syria and Iraq. Despite a large presence of more than 160 million Muslims in India, not more than a hundred people have travelled abroad to join IS. This article attempts to explain the low participation of Indian Muslims in foreign conflicts. Drawing on existing literature

Abstract This introductory essay provides an overview of the main subfields of research into the histories of foodstuffs, diet and nutrition in nineteenth- and twentieth-century South Asia, thus situating the contributions to this themed special section in wider historiographical debates and controversies. It argues that the bulk of existing research has focused either on the conflictual role of food

Abstract By 1928, Robert McCarrison’s laboratories in the South Indian hill station of Coonoor had become recognised as the centre for nutritional research in India. Five years earlier, however, his institute had faced closure. This article argues that the establishment of McCarrison’s institute was based on his pitch to the Royal Commission on Agriculture in India in 1926, in which he successfully

Abstract In 1925 the Madras Municipal Corporation introduced an innovative scheme to provide free midday meals for poor schoolchildren in the city. These meals were designed to both improve the physical health of the schoolchildren and contribute to their educational attainments. This paper examines the advice of nutritional experts at the Coonoor Centre for Nutritional Research and the new scientific

Abstract Analysing Indian protagonists’ strategies at the 15th World Vegetarian Congress in India in 1957, this article argues that they brought together Hindu nationalism and internationalism. By constructing non-violence and vegetarianism as a national heritage, they characterised India as a moral superpower above the divisions of the Cold War and endowed it with a global civilising mission. On the

Abstract This article traces the transnational history of Indian Multi-Purpose Food (Indian MPF, or simply MPF) to make two contributions to the historiography of development in post-War South Asia. Firstly, it illuminates the involvement of supporters of Indian nationalism in North America, who backed the use of food supplements in India, in the process of mobilising US resources to promote Indian

Abstract The cattle modernisation sought by American missionaries in colonial North India advanced a productivist argument around the efficiency of cattle and their contribution to agriculture. On the face of it, by criticising the excessive supply of cattle in North India, this position went against the core preservationist concerns of the cow protectionists. But in reality, these modernisers struck

Abstract The emergence of the bhadralok in the nineteenth century, typified by ‘genteel’ qualities and Western education, reflected changes in the nature of Bengali identity and subjectivity. The colonial experience resulted in an anxiety among elite Bengalis to define a social class for themselves that would delineate their gentility and shape a new code of ‘acceptability’. The ‘Babu’ came to be associated

(2020). In the Name of the Nation: India and Its Northeast. South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies: Vol. 43, No. 6, pp. 1232-1234.

Abstract The Bodoland Territorial Autonomous Districts (BTAD) in the state of Assam in Northeast India can be described as a landscape of terror since the area has been a stage for recurrent, mostly violent contestations along ethno-religious lines for more than four decades. Over the years, the violence has claimed more than a thousand lives and displaced millions. Using a multi-sited ethnography

(2020). The Decline of the Caste Question: Jogendranath Mandal and the Defeat of Dalit Politics in Bengal. South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies: Vol. 43, No. 6, pp. 1234-1236.

(2020). Resisting Disappearance: Military Occupation and Women’s Activism in Kashmir. South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies: Vol. 43, No. 6, pp. 1228-1230.

Abstract In this afterword, I critically reflect on the contributions to the special section, ‘Translating Sex: Locating Sexology in Indian History, 1880–1960’. Through an engagement with the six articles in the collection, my essay explores the uses and limits of the concept of ‘social reform’ and the analytical import and potential drawbacks to the concept of the ‘vernacular’. Finally, thinking through

(2020). Boundaries of Belonging: Localities, Citizenship and Rights in India and Pakistan. South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies: Vol. 43, No. 6, pp. 1230-1232.

Abstract In this paper, I explore the ways in which queer sex acts and orientations come to be coded through other modes of signifying excess in colonial and nationalist discourse. I explore the way in which food and sex are held on a continuum that ties gluttony to abstinence, creating the standards for respectable sexuality and a map for flouting them. Fundamentally, I look at how sex and food are

Abstract The three-cornered nature of decolonisation—the decline of European power, the culmination of US hegemony, and the immediate appropriation of the new nation by a post-colonial elite—was foundational to G.S. Ghurye’s detailed riposte to Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Female. I show how the ‘Father of Indian Sociology’ marshalled statistics, sexology and Sanskrit, along with a static

Abstract This essay offers a reading of advertisements of wearable technologies, or prostheses, designed to enhance sexual pleasure and physical health in Tibbi Dunya Lahore, an Urdu-language medical periodical. It contrasts the conception of the body implicit in these advertisements with that of earlier medieval and early modern discourses on sex. This juxtaposition of historically disparate discourses

Abstract Abul Hasanat (1905–?) was one of the most widely read Bengali sexologists. Having started researching in British India, he subsequently became a citizen of Pakistan and later of Bangladesh. He continued to research and publish throughout these changing political contexts. In this paper, I explore the difficulties in adequately ‘contextualising’ Hasanat’s sexology and propose instead the notion

Abstract This essay explores the evolution of Gandhi’s philosophy of brahmacharya (celibacy) after World War I. I argue here that Gandhi broadened his understanding of brahmacharya after he assumed leadership of the nationalist movement, rendering it into a concept that was applicable to the wider population of India rather than just to himself and a set of especially disciplined activists. A major

Abstract This article centres on the Hindi sexology writings of a woman, Yashoda Devi, and a Shudra, Santram B.A. In the context of an efflorescence of vernacular sexology literature in early twentieth-century North India, it explicates how their writings moved along different registers, whereby they envisaged a heterosexual ethics that relied on utopian and dystopian descriptions of modernity. Sexology

Abstract This introduction to ‘Translating Sex’ places the six essays included in this special section in the context of the history of sexuality in the Indian subcontinent, and argues for a need to write more comprehensive histories of sexology—the field of inquiry which promoted the understanding of sex as a ‘scientific object’ around the globe at the turn of the twentieth century. It identifies

Abstract In Hinduism, sindoor is a symbol of a married woman’s chastity, love and fidelity towards her husband. This potent mark inscribed on the forehead and in the parting of a woman’s hair serves as a reminder of her heterosexual identity, unavailability to other men, and the ownership of her body by her husband. Problematising how this heteropatriarchal imperative has complicated the bodily boundaries

Abstract This paper investigates the development of a close relationship between the Ford Foundation—the world’s richest and most internationally oriented philanthropic organisation in the Cold War era—and India in the 1950s. Unlike existing literature on private foundation–recipient country relationships, which overwhelmingly focusses on the donor perspective, this essay explores the recipient perspective

Abstract This article explores the links forged between members of the Ghadar Movement and Mexican radical activists and organisers in North America during the early twentieth century. It argues that during the opening two decades of the century, Mexico and its convulsed politics offered radical anti-colonial Indian activists in North America an inspiring example and a source of important tactical

Abstract India’s current ‘pro-business’ development regime has been both challenged by depictions of malevolent corporations oppressing helpless village communities and legitimised by depictions of socially responsible corporations ‘developing’ grateful backward communities. To overcome these contradictory narratives, which fail to account for the intricate relationships between villagers and corporate

(2020). Debating Women’s Citizenship in India, 1930–1960. South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies: Vol. 43, Literary Sentiments in the Vernacular: Gender and Genre in Modern South Asia, pp. 1009-1011.

(2020). Mountain, Water, Rock, God: Understanding Kedarnath in the Twenty-First Century. South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies: Vol. 43, Literary Sentiments in the Vernacular: Gender and Genre in Modern South Asia, pp. 1011-1012.

(2020). Review Essay: Criminality, Sexuality and Gender in British India Special Focus: Governing Gender and Sexuality in Colonial India: The Hijra, c. 1850–1900. South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies: Vol. 43, Literary Sentiments in the Vernacular: Gender and Genre in Modern South Asia, pp. 1013-1017.

Abstract Pioneering women’s periodicals in Bengali in the second half of the nineteenth century eloquently deplore the social confinement of women. Contesting this paradigm of female immobility, travelogues written by Bengali women simultaneously start to appear in the pages of such journals as Bāmābodhinıī Patrikā, Bhāratıī, Antaḥpur, etc., from the 1860s onwards. Unlike the famous nineteenth-century

Abstract This article examines gendered lives in vernacular fiction by focusing on the topic of child adoption as fictionalised in Hindi literature in late colonial India (1920s). It argues that non-conformance and non-normativity dominated the short stories selected for this article. The feature of non-conformance towards normative assumptions in middle-class Hindu society also concerned Hindi literary

Abstract This essay considers the methodological intervention of understanding a ‘mother tongue’ (matribhasha) as a gendered vernacular. It seeks to illustrate the subversive potential of the vernacular as a gendered lens though which we can understand the Dalit feminist critiques of caste hierarchies and Dalit and non-Dalit patriarchies, and the places they intersect. The essay considers the works

Abstract The Persianate genre of the tazkira, or biographical compendium, typically concerns poets and Sufi saints, but a different approach is taken in Yadgar-e Rozgar, published in 1931 by Sayyid Badr al-Hasan, an aristocrat and honorary magistrate from Patna. Hasan focuses on the ordinary people—landlords and courtesans, doctors and bakers, lawyers and counterfeiters—who made up Patna’s social world

Abstract This article focuses on vernacular travel writings on America and Europe by Swami Satyadev ‘Parivrajak’ (1879–1961), one of the first persons to systematically write travelogues in Hindi. I argue that Parivrajak’s travel literature was part of a colonised nation’s attempt to reclaim a space of freedom, forged through the carving of ‘perfect masculine bodies’, which embodied his ideals of beauty

Abstract The influential Tamil writer Pudumaippittan turned to the short story to theorise the relationship between literature and society in the late colonial era. He used the genre’s brevity to compress his portrayals of well-known female types—such as widows, prostitutes and goodwives—into singular emotional events. This enabled Pudumaippittan to evoke the wider debates about tradition and modernity

Abstract The tumultuous politics of the post-Independence period in Bombay/Mumbai, and the creation of the linguistic states, released multiple and contradictory energies towards a re-examination of the Marathi language and its valence in linguistic, literary, social and cultural contexts. This essay employs the bilingual poetry of Arun Kolatkar and the Marathi-language poetry of R.K. Joshi to show

Abstract The story of Kausalya Baisantry’s life of anti-caste activism is featured in Urmila Pawar and Meenakshi Moon’s Amhihi Itihasa Ghadavala (We Also Made History) in Marathi, and in her own book-length work of ‘autobiography literature’ written in Hindi as Dohra Abhishap (Doubly Cursed), but it is a speech Baisantry delivered in English as a college student activist that Pawar and Moon discuss

Abstract Ostensibly, Muslim women in colonial India only rarely wrote travel narratives, particularly in Urdu. In truth, women’s travel writing in Urdu is anything but chimerical, but persistent archival and methodological limitations have led to the neglect and even irrevocable loss of this writing. A recalibrated approach to travel writing and archival practices divulges a vast corpus—but only if

Abstract This collection brings together nine essays, accompanied by nine short translations, that redraw the boundaries of literary histories both temporally and spatially. The essays, rooted in the humanities and informed by interdisciplinary area studies, explore multiple linkages between forms of print culture, linguistic identities and diverse vernacular literary spaces in colonial and post-colonial

Abstract India’s border with Bangladesh figures in the Indian national imagination as a unifying construct for multiple anxieties from illegal immigration to cattle smuggling, thus garnering public support for increased border security. What does a view from the lived and messy realities of the borderlands offer when we shift our focus from the fetish of the borderline as a political and religious

(2019). The Political Biography of an Earthquake: Aftermath and Amnesia in Gujarat, India. South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies: Vol. 42, No. 6, pp. 1210-1211.

(2019). India Connected: How the Smartphone Is Transforming the World’s Largest Democracy. South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies: Vol. 42, No. 6, pp. 1212-1213.

(2019). Cosmopolitan Dreams: The Making of Modern Urdu Literary Culture in Colonial South Asia. South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies: Vol. 42, No. 6, pp. 1213-1214.

(2019). The Radical Impulse: Music in the Tradition of the Indian People’s Theatre Association. South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies: Vol. 42, No. 6, pp. 1215-1216.

(2019). Religion as Critique: Islamic Critical Thinking from Mecca to the Marketplace. South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies: Vol. 42, No. 6, pp. 1217-1218.

Abstract This paper explores the experiences of migrant women from Northeast India who work in retail stores in malls in Delhi and Gurgaon, and the conflicting discourses of modernity and marginality which they negotiate at work and outside work. Managers of high-end retail stores in malls view these women as ‘modern’, ‘global’ and reflective of the aesthetic sensibilities of the brands they are hired

Abstract In October 2016, protests erupted across southern India opposing a Supreme Court judgement banning an annual agricultural festival featuring jousts between men and bulls. The Court ruled the contests as infringing animal rights. Rural constituencies rallied behind the festival as a customary practice and symbol of agrarian culture. This essay suggests that the conflict between the two constituencies

Abstract This introduction outlines how the essays in this special section contribute to scholarship on cow protection in India. It argues that they disrupt three powerful framing binaries—religion/economy, legality/illegality and cow-lover/cow-killer—that have tended to dominate the literature on cow protection. Making tangible the analytical limits of these categories, the essays find new critical

Abstract A large-scale displacement of Kashmiri Pandits occurred in 1989–90 when Kashmir came under the control of secessionist groups. The successful resettlement of these refugees was dependent on their access to cultural and social capital. For the migrants from rural areas of Kashmir, resettlement was accompanied by occupational rupture because they had lost their immovable assets such as land

Abstract Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with butchers, cattle traders and beef eaters in South India, the aims of this paper are twofold. Firstly, it challenges two dominant assumptions made in respect of cattle slaughter and beef consumption in South Asia: one, that the beef trade directly concerns only Muslims, Dalits, Adivasis and Christians, and two, that respect for cattle is the near sole

Abstract Many of the controversial actions of the central and state governments in India in recent months—from strengthened anti-slaughter laws to the issuing of ‘identification cards’ to cattle—have been made in the name of animal husbandry or breed improvement. Such gestures are generally understood to be superficial, and recent. They have been attributed to post-colonial influences: the pressure