Study of conjugal relationships between Indian women and British men in colonial India.

"During the colonial period, Indian intellectuals--philologists, lawyers, scientists and literary figures--all sought to hold a mirror to their country. Whether they wrote novels, polemics, or scientific treatises, all sought a better understanding of society in general and their society in particular. Curiously, female sexuality and sexual behavior play an outside role in their writing. The figure of the prostitute is ubiquitous in everything from medical texts and treatises on racial evolution to anti-Muslim polemic and studies of ancient India. In this book, Durba Mitra argues that between the 1840s and the 1940s, the new science of sexuality became foundational to the scientific study of Indian social progress. The colonial state and an emerging set of Bengali male intellectuals extended the regulation of sexuality to far-reaching projects that sought to define what society should look like and how modern citizens should behave. An exploration of this history of social scientific thought offers new perspectives to understand the power of paternalistic and deeply violent claims about sexual norms in the postcolonial world today. These histories reveal the enduring authority of scientific claims to a tradition that equates social good with the control of women's free will and desire. Thus, they managed to dramatically reorganize their society around upper-caste Hindu ideals of strict monogamy"--

Examines the colonial and postcolonial governance of gender and sexuality through the history of transgender Hijras in north India.

This book commemorates 150 years of railways in India. Introduced under colonial rule in the second half of the nineteenth century, the railways soon embraced the length and breadth of India bringing with it rapid political, economic, ecological and cultural changes. The articles in this book explore the impact of this technological phenomenon from a range of interdisciplinary perspectives. From early railway thinking in renaissance Bengal, to railway policing in Uttar Pradesh and issues of management to railway themes in literature, the writers in this volume reveal the world of the railways in all its exciting facets. The photo essay invokes the nostalgic world of steam with a series of evocative images. In the twenty-first century, the ever expanding horizon of the railways continues to draw in people and goods in the third largest railway network in the world.

Danna Agmon's gripping microhistory is a vivid guide to the "Nayiniyappa Affair" in the French colony of Pondicherry, India. The surprising and shifting fates of Nayiniyappa and his family form the basis of this story of global mobilization, which is replete with merchants, missionaries, local brokers, government administrators, and even the French royal family. Agmon's compelling account draws readers into the social, economic, religious, and political interactions that defined the European colonial experience in India and elsewhere. Her portrayal of imperial sovereignty in France's colonies as it played out in the life of one beleaguered family allows readers to witness interactions between colonial officials and locals. Thanks to generous funding from Virginia Tech and its participation in TOME, the ebook editions of this book are available as Open Access volumes from Cornell Open (cornellpress.cornell.edu/cornell-open) and other repositories.

Debates about family, property, and nation in Tamil India

First published in 1999.Jyoti Puri draws on post-colonial and feminist theory to focus on how women in current-day India conceptualize their gender and sexuality. She provides a groundbreaking ethnographic study based on fifty-four middle- and upper-class Indian women, ranging from the ages of fifteen to thirty-eight. She argues that these women's narratives are shaped by not only the nation-state, but by transnational processes as well. Woman, Bodyand Desire in Postcolonial India connects important issues of class an nationhood to the emerging sense of female identity in India, covering previously neglected topics such as menstruation, gay and straight sexual experience, sexual harassment and assault, marriage and motherhood. Puri discovers that attitudes about sexuality and gender are surprisingly similar in India and Western countries.