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The Chains of Albion Thomas, Edwin. A fine tight copy in a fine unflawed dust jacket which is now protected in an archival cover. Appears to be an unread copy. Signed by Author on title page.. Used book in good condition. Has wear to the cover and pages. Contains some markings such as highlighting and writing. Ex-library with the usual stamps. Chains Of Albion Thomas, Edwin.
Signed 1st UK edition of the second reluctant swashbuckling adventure of Lieutenant Martin Jerrold, that master of bad luck, bad timing and bad behavior. All of our first editions are first printings unless otherwise noted. Dustwrappers are protected with clear archival wraps and we pack each book like it's a Tiffany egg. First edition hard back binding in publisher's original plum paper covers, gilt lettering to the spine.
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We're sorry - this copy is no longer available. More tools Find sellers with multiple copies Add to want list. Didn't find what you're looking for? Once again, Sorabji's harsh reaction was refracted through a critique of clothing this time, it was the "foppishness" of Rukhmabai's male friend that helped to make Rukhmabai the object of her scorn. Blackness also recurs as a trope of her superiority to other Indians in Britain, a significant maneuver here given both Parsis' light skin and Sorabji's own possible Toda ancestry. As for Rukhmabai, the smugness of higher breeding and traces of Somervillian superiority combined as Sorabji constructed her countrywoman as decidedly disrespectable, both in absolute terms and in comparison to herself.
The strain of performing "the Indian woman student at Oxford" combined with the pressure of doing well academically was taking a toll on Cornelia whether her audience was her family in Poona, her peers at Oxford, fellow travelers in the British Library, or Rukhmabai, whom she perceived as a rival for the attention of the colonial reform community in England.
In the midst of all this, Sorabji's benefactors were trying to rearrange her course once again, this time so that she could sit for the Bachelor of Civil Law examination. This idea had originally been Cornelia's, and at first Sir William Markby had discouraged her, telling her it was "off [her] lines.
The stakes were again being raised, since Sorabji now had one year in which to prepare an exam that, when she had first come to Oxford almost two years earlier, Markby did not think she could have succeeded at in that time frame. But she was undaunted, except by the delay it meant in returning to her family in India.
She was buoyed too by positive feedback from her tutors and an almost filial relationship with Jowett and Muller. Dicey was another character altogether. While he assured her that her papers were better than those of many of the men, she thought his interactions with her strained. Dicey is just as flail of knowledge and as clear and as uncouth and badly dressed and unwashed as he was last term.
Perhaps understandably, Sorabji's predisposition toward candor was more easily realized in private than in public, where she sensed that even well-meaning observers were apt to make rash and stereotypical judgments about her based on their presumptions of what an "Indian woman" was. She was not necessarily averse to doing public speaking but she was far more comfortable in the all-female debating club at Somerville, in which she participated with great enthusiasm and some success, than in her talks for the CMS.
Understanding that she was an "advertisement" for India and for the Christian mission there, and performing that role, were vastly different experiences. When she arrived at one CMS meeting in the spring of to speak, for example, she discovered that it was "a large public affair, and to my great annoyance I saw I had been placarded about.
I hate this publicity. She even turned away two women photographers who came to visit her while she was staying in London, politely but firmly declining their offer to take her picture. On another occasion, when she was apparently having second thoughts about allowing a picture of herself to be published, Lady Hobhouse advised her as follows: This was in an important sense exactly what Sorabji objected to.
She was not against "being public" as much as she resisted being made public without any control over how she was represented. She was quite upset when Mrs. I hate my finances and everything to become public property and there are some mistakes in the article. And yet, Sorabji's relationship to publicity was not exactly as straightforward as this. To be sure, she was entitled to her privacy, especially over her financial arrangements; being a good sister was also important to her.
But she was loathe to see her plans in print because she did not want any other Indian women coming to Oxford, to study law or anything else, while she was there. Her desire to be "the" Indian woman at Oxford, and indeed, in England a desire manifested in her response to the princesses, to Rukhmabai, and to the woman novelist in the British Library was never more pronounced than in her reaction to the possibility that one of her countrywomen might come to Britain to study law.
In response to her sister Lena's inquiry about whether she had heard of another Indian woman doing law, Sorabji replied that she knew nothing about it. Happily I have my School to myself and doubtless will to the end of my course unless a Bhore appears to compete with me. She admitted to her parents that her reluctance to see her plans made public was "only a petty monopoly of my ideas lest the Bhores should get them.
I am resigning myself to 'a shadow' within the next year or so Lily Bhore perhaps or even the fair Isabel. Perhaps because she was so invested in being the one and only Indian jewel in the crown of imperial Oxford, exercising control over her career and her public image was of the utmost importance to Sorabji throughout her time at Somerville.
She was less reticent about speaking her mind and hence perhaps about being herself in print than in person, even when her printed word entered the public arena. While she was in Britain, Sorabji wrote several articles for the Nineteenth Century. One of these, "Stray Thoughts of an Indian Girl" which she had originally titled "Social India" , was quite controversial for the position she took in it on the question of child marriage reform a question very much in the public eye in Britain and India since the Age of Consent Act controversy the year before.
India lacks the moral courage to make her own social reforms and I think legislation would only be giving her a crutch which however I doubt whether she will use. The fault of our country has always been. I will refrain from corrupting your respectable ideas on the subject. It is sufficient if one of the family be heterodox. The fact that Rukhmabai's legal case had been among the fillips for the age-of-consent legislation may have also motivated Sorabji's remarks, especially since Rukhmabai herself had written a piece for an English periodical on the subject in In any event, the antinationalist stance for which Sorabji was later to become infamous was in the process of being articulated for the first time here.
Doing instead of talking was Sorabji's motto, and it must have been frustrating to find herself so ready for action while she still had the hurdle of the BCL exam to get over. As the exams approached, Sorabji went into virtual seclusion at Somerville, reading and revising, getting very little sleep and, because of the physical and mental strain, thinking she saw ghosts in the residence hall corridors at night. Once again, the fact that she was Indian and a woman intruded upon her course.
As late as a week before the BCL she learned that "owing to some mismanagement," the conditions under which she was to be allowed to sit the exam that is, whether it was to be "in public," with the men, or privately were still not settled. She was "driven nearly mad with distraction" until Jowett sent her word that she was to write her papers in the examination hall like everyone else.
Cornelia's description of the experience is worth reproducing at length, for it is a rare enough account of what women faced who sought university credentials from Oxbridge in the nineteenth century. My Fellow-Candidates were very, comic indeed. I went down to the Schools in company with Cherub [her nickname for a Somervillian friend] and one or two others who were in for History and Classics pale anxious undergraduates in white ties thronged the Schools Entrance Hall.
To the left stood my co-victims 25 in number with. Graduates' gowns and furlined hoods scared Barristers who had waited 50 years for a brief, Country Clergy some of them M. I felt so small and humiliated in comparison. They treated me very kindly. I was conducted to a seat and taken care of till that awful electric bell went, and the clerk shouted "Civil Law. East School, through the quad. I was not at all frightened, I was quite calm outwardly, but very curious as to what would happen, half-fearing I would have to scratch i. I clenched my left fist hard, and wrote for my very life.
The Papers were very difficult and they gave [the] stiffest things in my nicest subjects so that I felt I could not have done myself justice: The standard is exceedingly high so don't expect more than a third even if I am through. When Sorabji spoke of the experience as a humiliation, she anticipated the characterization that other first generation university women would use to describe their collegiate experiences. Florence Rich, writing to Helen Darbishire, the principal of Somerville, in , recounted that she had wanted to read zoology in the early days of the college but discovered that it was not open to her though one of the professors she approached suggested that she apply anyway.
I dreaded the horrid publicity! Sorabji, for her part, may have been referring to the fact that she was the only woman in public in a crowd of older men; being the only Indian as well as the only woman was no doubt an added strain.
Taking the exam under these circumstances must have made it extremely difficult to concentrate. Her description of the exam takers as "co-victims" and her equation of approaching the exam site with mounting a "funeral pyre" is, however, undoubtedly the most remarkable feature of this passage. Sorabji's nephew Richard has suggested that this is an instance of classic Sorabji wit, as well as a subtle jibe at Oxford a place that, for all its civilizing pretensions, nonetheless required women to commit a ritual sacrifice exam taking for the sake of an Oxford degree.
Geraldine Forbes has suggested that Sorabji may also have been referring to the Rajasthani ritual of Johur, when the wives of the defeated mounted a pyre together to escape abduction and rape at the hands of their enemies. In addition, I think, Sorabji's choice of language signals an identification with the Hindu sati that tells us how acutely aware she was at this critical juncture of her Indianness as well as her femaleness and how dense the web of signification was around the self-sacrificing Hindu woman in Victorian imperial culture.
And if, as Indira Chowdhury-Sengupta has argued, satis represented chastity as well as conjugal devotion , Cornelia may have been attempting to prove her sexual respectability in this particularly public mixed space. To seek to become "the Indian woman" at the heart of the empire meant, in some profound if not ineluctable way, identifying with one of the most available, and most stereotypical, behaviors of Indian womanhood: Even though she was not a Hindu woman but a Parsi Christian, and even though she had invested so much time and energy in differentiating herself from "the Hindu woman" in the person of Rukhmabai, when she faced the judgment of the Oxford examination system, Sorabji laid claim to the same powerful image that shaped much contemporary opinion of Indian women.
In this particular theater of empire which is to say, playing to both Oxford and the audience of her family adopting the identity, of the Parsi Christian could not finally match the spectacle of performing as "the" Indian, if not "the Hindu," woman. There appears at this moment to have been little heroism in it for her.
For while she had enthusiastically embraced the BCL and its challenges, she may have felt in the end that she had been maneuvered into this close and terrible space by a set of systems Oxford, philanthropy, imperial culture that demanded submission, with consent, of the female colonial subject. Sorabji did not of course give up her will or relinquish control: She was disappointed and upset, partly as she felt that she had been bullied by a Professor Nelson in the viva when she challenged some unspecified canonical interpretation of "private law.
Write and tell me that you are not very ashamed of or disappointed in me though if you are it will be only what I deserve. I am staying to dissolve and pack [O]n Monday I turn my face forever on the happiest time life can have for me. I feel it intensely. Dear Oxford no other place can ever be to me what thou art!
Sorabji remained another year in England after leaving Somerville.
During this time she visited friends all over the British Isles, worked as a clerk in the London law offices of Lee and Pemberton where her friend Alice Bruce's uncle was also employed , and tried to settle a more permanent position for herself consonant with her training and new qualifications in India. It was an uphill battle, in part because on the colonial no less than in the "domestic" British scene, patronage and connections were key to getting work.
She had well-placed contacts in London and indeed, throughout England, who gave her conflicting advice about what kind of work to seek and how to find it. Lord Reay thought she should aim for the Indian bar; Sir Ameer Ali recommended a post in a solicitor's office in Bombay; while Sir Raymond West counseled her to set up independent practice in Kattiawar after passing the pleaders' exam. Nothing more was mentioned about the Nizam's advertisement for a "lady legal commissioner," but Sorabji continued to hope for a post that would enable her to work with women's property cases. Purdabnasbin were already uppermost in her mind.
As she put it in a talk she gave in Chelsea in March of , "[T]he man can do the pleading in the Courts of Law but none but a woman can put in train for him cases which come from behind the purdah. Cornelia was reluctant to deliver her sister up to Mrs. Gilmore and the CMS, for she felt certain that the Society would bind Alice to missionary work in exchange for their financial support. It may well have distracted her from dwelling too much on her own. In the end, Alice qualified as a doctor in London in Sorabji continued to consider Dick and Phiz her responsibilities, but what she most worried about was money.
Lady Hobhouse relieved of her the necessity of paying back the fund the Hobhouses had established and Lord Hobhouse provided the fifty guineas necessary to article her at Lee and Pemberton. Meanwhile, she had few funds of her own with which to support herself and was forced, almost immediately upon leaving Somerville, to ask her father to loan her money for her eventual passage home. In keeping with what Reba Softer has noted about other British university women of her generation, Sorabji discovered that independence ended rather than began with graduation.
This was not easy for her: I have no one else to provide for me. These were in the long run merely temporary setbacks. Upon her return to India she eventually qualified as a barrister of the High Court, Calcutta, worked as a legal adviser to women landholders under the Court of Wards, and served as consulting counsel to the government of Bengal. Sorabji traveled back and forth between Britain and India often during her lifetime.
As she put it in , "[I]f to feel in one's pulse the great axioms of two continents, if to love two worlds as different as East is from West, to vibrate with one set of susceptibilities to the griefs and joys, the folktales and literatures of both, be a privilege, then indeed I am blessed and privileged among women. Her years at Somerville and in London are interesting and important not necessarily because they were formative, but because they reveal the complexity of the late nineteenth-century colonial encounter as it occurred on British soil, as well as the hybridity of colonial subjectivities, historically speaking.
That Sorabji could see through what she called "the brutal oppression of [missionaries] which they label zeal for the cause"; that she analyzed and resisted her exploitation and that of her family by all manner of colonial reformers' schemes; that she succeeded in negotiating the chiefly male, white world of Victorian Oxford and, in the end, remained an anglophile, no less all this is testament to what Ania Loomba calls the "torturous but dynamic movement" of identities under colonialism. This "torturous but dynamic movement" and the fixity it defies is an index of the contingency of colonial hegemony, evidence of the possibility that it may be negotiated and resisted, that it is ultimately always transformed by those who encounter it, and not always in predictable ways.
If Sorabji represents an unusual and even unique instance of this kind of transformation, one can only imagine that she would be delighted to hear it. In London, men must do as men do in London. John Murray, The World of London Poor Annie pilots me through the rocks and shoals of street-arabism. I am dressed in a loose flannel suit, such as we often use in India on a rainy day.
They do not seem to use flannel here, save for cricket or lawn-tennis. So, near Paddington, I am assailed with the sneering question Yaw, gov'nor, foine day for cricket? Scarcely have we come to a turning when three ladies walk up to me, and one of them asks if I'll let them look at my hat. These ladies are not street arabs. Annie suggests they may be photographers or artists.
But I would rather not give them a sitting. Like his countrywomen, Malabari faced the scrutiny of a variety of English observers invested alternately in his authentic Indianness and his apparent pretensions to Englishness "Yaw, gov'nor, foine day for cricket?
And like so many colonial and former colonial travelers who have made their way to the metropole and to London in particular, Malabari was repeatedly hailed as "the" colonial an interpolation that called attention to, and tried to contain, the spectacle of the native at home. If, as James Winter has suggested, mastery of the streets constituted a claim to manhood, Englishness, and even subjecthood in Victorian cultural terms, The Indian Eye may be read as a display of Malabari's claim to all three.
It produces, in the process, a critique of the promise of "manly" sovereignty offered by colonial rule. The historical relationships between manhood, manliness, and colonial power relations that Marilyn Lake has drawn our attention to for the Australian context, Catherine Hall for Jamaica, Mrinalini Sinha for Bengal, and Gail Bederman for the United States are played out in equally culturally specific ways throughout the narrative of The Indian Eye. Whether as the target of young street boys' taunts or as the object of the polite yet intrusive curiosity of strangers, Malabari was made into a colonial spectacle, a process that repeatedly called the legitimacy of his masculinity, as measured by Victorian standards, into question.
As Mrinalini Sinha has argued, ideologies of masculinity were already a crucial component of justifications for imperialism in this period. Throughout official imperial policy and unofficial imperial mentalities, the very category of "Indian masculinity" typically associated with physical weakness and uncontrolled sexuality, two characteristics also assigned to European women was continually suspect, and such sus-. If Malabari was unnerved by assaults on his person in the streets of London, however, he was quick to neutralize challenges to his masculinity and, by implication, to his right as a citizen-subject of empire to walk the capital's thoroughfares unmolested.
The Paddington boys' mockery their insinuation that he did not look the part of the authentic Englishman led him to "Other" them by labeling them street "arabs. He also demonstrated that he was "streetwise" that is, possessed of a certain kind of urban "knowingness" that was proof of his urbanity in the face of modernity's "primitive" underside. Malabari, meanwhile, was momentarily stabilized as the bemused but still gentlemanly observer, especially since though it is not self-evident from the excerpt above he was accompanied by an Indian manservant.
The English women's scrutiny provoked a somewhat different response. When they indicated that they might be interested in representing him either by photograph or painting Malabari recorded his staunch refusal: He rejected it in part because in this instance, it was being mobilized by women who, drawn to him by his Indian adornment pugaree , threatened to effeminize him by making him the fetishized colonial subject upon which imperial rule depended. Anticipating what Homi Bhabha calls the characteristic maneuver of the resistant postcolonial subject, Malabari appeared to be questioning the very space, the very frame of representation, through which the colonizer manages the antagonism at the heart of the colonial relation.
The above anecdotes suggest that performances of masculinity can be strategically mobilized according to specific, situational asymmetries of power, and that men subordinated by hegemonic gender norms are capable of deploying other forms of masculinity both to resist domination and to create subordinates of their own.
In the context of British imperialism, where Indian men competed with British men for terrain, legitimacy, and authority over colonized women, the performance of colonial masculinity varied enormously and was contingent on the evershifting ground of imperial hegemony and nationalist-indigenous challenges to it. This grid is particularly germane for the case of Malabari, whose interest in raising the age of consent for Hindu girls animated his reform commitments in the s and occasioned his trip to London in the first place.
Chapter 4 examines Malabari's movement to and movement through the imperial metropole in order to explore the spatial and cultural contingencies of one colonial subject's masculinity in the late-Victorian period. As a flaneur, a social reform crusader, and the apparently quintessential "Indian man" in London during the season, Malabari encountered challenge after challenge to his presumptions about how to operate as "the male colonial subject" at the heart of the empire, even while he produced a critical reading of English culture, Western sexual mores, and European modernity itself.
His ethnography of local British culture and of native Britons participated in a domestic tradition of urban social investigation as well as an emergent literature that turned Indian male "eyes" on English life. Like the letters of Ramabai and Sorabji, then, Malabari's text is historical evidence of how the workings of imperial power may be analyzed in the everyday social relations of a variety of domestic urban spaces particularly since the "man in the street" is one of the chief figures of the everyday in the modern Western cultural imagination.
Behramji Malabari was no stranger to metropolitan culture: Postans, an early Victorian observer, was just one of many who noted the cultural vibrancy of Bombay. Its bazaars were "animated with the groups and costumes of various and many nations," among whom numbered "the proud Moslem, the stately Armenian, the crafty Jew, the daring Arab, and the cautious Hindoo, all mingled in her streets. Nowhere else probably in the world, not even in Alexandria, are so many and such striking varieties of race, nationality, and religion represented as in Bombay.
Not only is there great diversity of type among the Hindoos, the Banias of Gujarat differing as widely in appearance and manners from the Maratha of the Deccan, as the Englishman differs from the Italian; not only do the Mohammodans include, besides Indian Musalmans, many Afghans, Persians, Arabs, Turks, Malays and Abyssinians; not only are colonies of Jews and Armenians to be found among this motley population; but the city is the head-quarters of the thriving and prolific race of Parsis, and contains many thousands of Indo-Portuguese inhabitants.
To crown all, there are the European inhabitants, engaged either in the service of the Government, or in professional or mercantile pursuits a class of the community not strong in numbers, but supreme in political and social power. By midcentury "an asylum for all," Bombay was also home to a carefully forged and institutionally variable political and social system that balanced the interests of the four main groups in the city: Europeans, Hindus, Parsis, and Muslims.
Although it has not been the focus of recent studies of either The Indian Eye or his role in the Age of Consent Act controversy, the fact that Malabari was a Parsi was crucial to the ways he was able to navigate Hindu and European communities in India, as well to the kind of gender politics he embraced before and during his sojourn in the United Kingdom. Parsi wealth was founded on collaboration with European entrepreneurs, mostly in western India: Leaders of the Parsi community in Bombay also saw themselves as cultural mediators between the English and the Hindus.
By the s Parsi identification with the British government and with European commercial enterprise in India generated an attitude of "aloofness" toward Hindu social customs and a concomitant identification with British reform initiatives that targeted them a propensity we have already seen at work in Cornelia Sorabji's attitudes toward Rukhmabai. Some of this aloofness may be attributed to a movement among a group of Parsis led by K.
Readymoney to reclaim a more pure Zoroastrianism the monotheistic religion to which the majority of Parsis subscribed and which some believed had become corrupted by contact with Hindu polytheism.
But the critique of Hinduism was also part of the larger embrace of the project of anglicization that many urban Parsis espoused. They recognized, in other words, that the allegedly "sustaining structure of error in Hinduism" was the symbolic site of British claims to cultural superiority and that connection with or sympathy for contemporary Hindu traditions and communities threatened to associate other colonial subjects with the same pathologies, inferiority, and incapacity for rule that the British attributed to the totality of "the Hindu nation.
Distancing themselves from Hinduism and its symbolic linkages to colonial subjection was, from midcentury onward, essential to the Parsis' project of accommodation with British power and prestige. Accommodating the process of Westernization in Bombay entailed a social distancing from the Hindu way of life. It also required a rejection of what were perceived as regressive Hindu attitudes toward women most notably in terms of child marriage, the seclusion of women, and the prohibition of widow remarriage. As a number of scholars have argued, such practices were considered to represent authentic Hinduism by British authorities and nationalist reformers alike even though Dadhabai Naoroji, a leading Parsi and president of the Indian National Congress, had married a child bride himself.
Critiques of Hindu women's status or condition were generally held up as evidence of both a civilizing potential and a modernizing capacity on the part of those who articulated them. Dosabhai Karaka, a Parsi writing in the s, clearly understood what kind of cultural capital he wielded when he pointed with pride to the fact that benevolence and civic philanthropy in Bombay illustrated an affinity between Parsis and the British that no other group in the city could match.
Stead averse to this kind of discursive ventriloquism: By the next year, the celebrated case of Rukhmabai filled the Bombay newspapers. Despite the impact of her father's conversion on Sorabji's Christian convictions, it was her mother whom Cornelia chose to remember as the heart and soul of the Sorabji family, the very embodiment of its conviction that "we were in the world to serve others. Given her attitude toward Hindu women, especially those in the public eye, Sorabji's reaction was more than the result of family feeling or personal jealousy, though these were dearly at work. In his "notes" he blamed the "priestly class" and the "social monopolists" with whom it had allied for their "vulgar prejudices" prejudices he claimed endorsed a reading of the Shastras as advocating early marriage and the outcasting of widows.
It was an affinity demonstrated, he believed, by the fact that the Parsis "have not followed the Hindus into the cruel custom of prohibiting their widows from re-marrying, a tyranny which is sometimes followed by so much sin and mischief. Parsis who came to Britain for a variety of business, educational, and political purposes took to platforms and produced pamphlets testifying to what they constructed as the cultural divide between themselves and "other" natives of India.
Dadhabai Naoroji, perhaps the most well-known Parsi in the West, drew attention to such distinctions in more than one public lecture in the s, arguing that whereas Hindus had fallen from a golden age where women's status had been higher and by implication, their marital arrangements less coercive , Parsis had always been monogamous. Such hierarchies themselves were in part exacted by colonial rule. As Partha Chatterjee has noted, in order to shore up its own legitimacy, the colonial state was invested in enumerating diverse communities and in "bringing over to its side the 'natural leaders'" from some of those communities to join its rule over "the rest" of India.
In one of his lectures referred to above, Naoroji defended the progress of some communities in India over others in order to refute the claims of an ethnologist that the "Asiatic races" had been slower to evolve than Europeans. Thus the quest to represent the Hindus as the truly backward "race" must be read as a strategy for appropriating cultural and finally political power under colonial rule and the connection between culture and politics is crucial here, since Naoroji was eventually to become president of the Indian National Congress. If this gesture appears to homogenize and differentiate communities with the same stroke, that is because Parsi nationalism, like all nationalisms, is "a phenomenon that registers difference even as it claims a unitary or unifying identity.
And yet by downplaying the historical impact of Hindu customs on Parsis in Bombay, spokesmen for the community did more than articulate their ambivalence toward colonial rule. They worked to identify themselves with the civilizing mission of the British so that they could deflect the colonial reform gaze and become reformers of other "native" communities themselves. Parsis were certainly not unique among Indian reformers in pledging their loyalty to the British Empire in the nineteenth century.
As Tanika Sarkar has written, "[T]he historian cannot afford to view the colonial past as an unproblematic retrospect where all power was on one side and all protest on another. Malabari was at the very center of these cultural politics in the Bombay of the s. The son of a clerk, he was educated in mission schools and had a reputation as an established poet by the s. He was instrumental not just in refining the gendered dimensions of contests for cultural legitimacy and power in the western presidency, but in refiguring such contests for consumption by the British reform public at home as well.
What propelled Malabari to prominence across India and prompted his visit to Britain in was what reformers in Victorian England and India called "the problem of Hindu women. His "notes" also contained analyses of the prohibition against widow remarriage, a practice that he and other reformers conventionally linked to child marriage in their critiques of Hindu religious custom. By the next year, the celebrated case of Rukhmabai filled the Bombay newspapers. The tremendous publicity her case received, combined with the fact that the judge ordered her to return to her husband or go to jail, gave Malabari's campaign against what he sometimes called "baby marriages" a singular, popular focus.
He used his own newspaper as well as other city papers in Bombay and all over India to condemn the practice, to call for state-sponsored reform and generally to feed the sociopolitical frenzy that surrounded the issue into the next decade. In so doing he helped to revive what had become a moribund social reform movement in Bombay, chiefly by using the Bombay press as his platform. Historians of late-Victorian Britain will recognize Malabari's use of the urban press corps to reflect and reproduce anxiety about the sexual activities of women and girls as strikingly parallel to W.
Eighteen eighty-five was clearly the "annus mirabilis" of sexual politics in locations beyond London, which Judith Walkowitz, Jeffrey Weeks, and others have identified as a primary site for state-sanctioned sexual proscription. Marina Valverde's recent work on the politics of social purity in English-speaking Canada in general and in Toronto in particular reinforces the dual conviction that such coincidences were far-reaching and that a refiguration of "British imperial culture" and its politics is therefore required.
Moreover, as Gall Bederman so persuasively argues, neither manhood nor modernity are transhistorical categories with "good moments as well as bad," but are rather ideological constructs and social practices that "[were] constantly being remade" in the nineteenth century. Malabari, for his part, was greatly interested in "the revelations of Mr. Stead," and their campaigns eventuated in legislation regulating the age of consent for females in Britain and India the Criminal Law Amendment Act of and the Age of Consent Act of Since it was his claim to represent "native opinion" about the age-of-consent issue, together with his search for British allies in his crusade for the reform of Hindu women, that brought Malabari to London in , I want to focus on three aspects of Malabari's involvement with "the woman question" in Bombay during this period: Malabari's attacks on child marriage were rooted in a critique of contemporary Hindu tradition, particularly its brahminical varieties.
In his "notes" he blamed the "priestly class" and the "social monopolists" with whom it had allied for their "vulgar prejudices" prejudices he claimed endorsed a reading of the Shastras as advocating early marriage and the outcasting of widows. In this respect, he echoed the sentiments of Victorian reformers like Mary Carpenter and prominent Indologists like Max Muller, both of whom had influenced his thinking on social questions in the decade before the Rukhmabai case. His views resonated more generally with over a century of British claims to understand the Vedic texts more accurately than the pundits themselves.
As a journalist at the heart of Bombay city politics, Malabari understood what was at stake in these controversies. He knew too that "the woman question" in India was not simply a matter of enlightened English critics versus Hindus blindly defending the Vedic tradition even if this was sometimes how the controversy was replayed in the imperial metropole. All Listings filter applied. Condition see all Condition. Item Location see all Item Location. All items listed on eBay. Show only see all Show only. Amounts shown in italicized text are for items listed in currency other than Singapore dollars and are approximate conversions to Singapore dollars based upon Bloomberg's conversion rates.
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