Home Science and the Nationalization of Domesticity in Colonial India

Hancock, Mary

doi:10.1017/s0026749x01004048

Cited by 35 publications

(15 citation statements)

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“…Mary Hancock (2001) makes similar arguments by highlighting the complicity of seemingly conflicting agents. Th rough her case study of the Home Science project in Madras, she argues that Home Science was the product of strategic alliances involving colonial authorities, Indian social reformers and Indian nationalists -all of whom, despite other differences, considered the home as a site of and symbol for nationalist modernity.…”

Section: Th E Nation-state Proposalmentioning

confidence: 92%

Between Science and Religion: An Astrological Interpretation of the Asian Tsunami in India

Liang

2008

Asian J Soc Sci

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Astrology plays an important role in Indian social life. Indian astrologers' claim to have accurately predicted the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami, or the Asian Tsunami, was an effort to legitimize astrology as a full science. This effort demonstrates a difficulty in knowledge categorization, for in India, astrology is neither classified as a science nor as a religion. This is a result of the idea of an Indian nation-state, which rests upon both science and religion as foundations, but at the expense of expelling astrology from religion for not being scientific. However, as astrology continues to be important in India, the astrological interpretation of the Indian Ocean Tsunami drew substantial public attention. Astrology's significant presence in Indian society shows the role of a mature civil society in India as well.

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Section: Th E Nation-state Proposalmentioning

confidence: 92%

Between Science and Religion: An Astrological Interpretation of the Asian Tsunami in India

Liang

2008

Asian J Soc Sci

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“…Partha Chatterjee () has made the argument that nationalist discourse in India located women in the interior space of the home: territorialising both in the service of an incipient national community. Attention to the history of women’s education suggests that this was reinforced, and indeed the modern albeit quintessentially Indian home imagined and materialised through women’s studies curricula (Hancock ), and the cultivation of domesticity in the women’s hostel (Krishnan ). Since independence, preoccupations among policy‐makers with women developing the “wrong” attachments that might detract from desirable national futures—often in language that explicitly associates the “correct” emotional education of women with national development—has justified enclosure and surveillance in hostels (Krishnan ).…”

Section: Framing Pre‐emption: Hostels Middle‐class Futures and Suicidementioning

confidence: 99%

Killing Us Slowly: Pre‐Empting Suicide at a Women’s Hostel in Chennai

Krishnan

2019

Antipode

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This paper draws on ethnographic research in Chennai to unpack the preemptive logic that shapes anti-suicide interventions at hostels-dormitories-for collegegoing women in this city. Its central contention is that a concern for the production of a presumed future becomes, in hostels, a governmental technology that is used to limit young women's lifeworlds in the present. These regimes of intervention reinforce the unliveability of attachments, intimacies and affects that popular discourse and scaled-up demographic narrative associate with the potential for suicide. Building from this, the paper also shows that such regimes engender feelings of suffocation and attrition among the young women who live in hostels. "Being slowly killed", as they call it, draws attention to suicide not as a spectacular event but as a site where the terms of everyday life are remade.

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“…As B. Meenu explains the situation, "while in the popular narrative about social reform, reformers and traditionalists appeared to be on the opposite sides of the battle when it came to widow remarriage, the reality was that 'the two sides in this dispute were not always clearly defined' " [Meenu 2017, 253]. The "woman's question" was indeed the "litmus test" for the reform sympathetic Indians, for the vast majority of whom the rising of the former was an infringement of their private territory, which was associated with the home [Hancock 2001;Chatterjee 1989]. Madhaviah definitely went beyond this majority not only by supporting the widow remarriage case, but also by putting this question to a higher degree.…”

Section: Madhaviah's "Turning Point"mentioning

confidence: 99%

The Question of Identity in Indian Reformers’ Discourse after the First World War: Madhaviah’s Case

Usoltseva¹

2018

Shìdnij svìt

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The question of identity of the "educated Indians" during the colonial era is defined in historiography in terms of "ambivalence", "schizophrenia", "neurosis" etc. This demonstrates the attempts of researchers to explain the specific way of self-determination of Western-educated class of Indians, which breaks down into several parallel levels often being contradictory by nature. At the end of the First World War, the representatives of Western-educated Indians were deeply concerned by the issue of self-determination due to the activation of the liberation movement with the tendency to revive and preserve their own tradition on the one hand, along with the reproduction of Westernized values and habits on the other hand. The limited number of the specific studies regarding the identity question in colonial context in general as well as the lack of the works corresponding to a particular region, period or society of India motivated this research. Addressing the identity problems in the post-war prose of Madhaviah allowed to study the specific behavior of "educated Indians" of Madras presidency and to shed some light on the identity issues within South Indian context. The current case study represents an attempt to clarify in which way Madhaviah, the prominent social reformer and the pioneer in Tamil prose writing, defines the identity question in his post-war prose. His short stories were published in the influential newspaper of that time -The Hindu, which dealt with both the social reforms and the nationalism. Therefore, the paper discusses whether Madhaviah's identity as a social reformer suffered due to the abovementioned dramatic events, and whether the reforming trend was in conflict with the nationalistic one in the Kusika's short stories.

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Home Science and the Nationalization of Domesticity in Colonial India

Cited by 35 publications

References 1 publication

Between Science and Religion: An Astrological Interpretation of the Asian Tsunami in India

Between Science and Religion: An Astrological Interpretation of the Asian Tsunami in India

Killing Us Slowly: Pre‐Empting Suicide at a Women’s Hostel in Chennai

The Question of Identity in Indian Reformers’ Discourse after the First World War: Madhaviah’s Case

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