The Politics of Gender, Community, and Modernity

Description

This collection of essays studies the provincial and the rural, locating the sites of the community and family as producing other histories. The volume is divided into three parts: the first part engages with disabling practices of history within communities; the second part works towards producing gendered and community-oriented histories of modernity in South Asia; the third part proposes post-colonialism as an appropriate term for discussions of history and modernity and includes reflections on the scholar's particular position within the history and modernity. In addition, there are certain methodological arguments and concepts that span the whole book, such as the implication of narratives and the power of pain.

About the Author

Nita Kumar is Brown Family Professor in South Asian History, Claremont McKenna College, California, USA.

Table of contents

Preface
Introduction
Section I: A New Historiography for South Asia
1:Provincialism in Modern India: The Multiple Narratives of Education and Their Pain
2:History and the Nation: The Learning of History in Calcutta and Banaras
3:The Family-School Relationship and an Alternative History of the Nineteenth-century Family
4:History at the Madrasas
Section II: Modernities, Communities, and Genders
5:Languages, Families, and the Plural Learning of the Nineteenth-century Intelligentsia
6:Mothers and Non-mothers: Gendering the Discourse of Education in South Asia
7:Widows, Education, and Social Change
8:Making the Nation: Ansari Women in Banaras
9:The Nature of Reform in Modern India: A discussion of mai, a novel by Geetanjali Shree
10:Learning Modernities? The Technology of Education in India
11:The Space of the Child: The Nation, the Neighbourhood, and the Home
Section III: Post-colonialism
12:The Scholar and Her Servants: Further Thoughts on Post-colonialism and Education
13:A Post-colonial School in a Modern World
Bibliography
Index