Empowerment and identity: The middle class and Hindu communalism in colonial Lucknow, 1880-1930.

Format:

Book

Thesis/Dissertation

Author/Creator:

Joshi, Sanjay.

Contributor:

Ludden, David, advisor.

University of Pennsylvania.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Ethnology--Research.

Ethnology.

Asia--History.

Asia.

History.

0332.

0631.

Penn dissertations--History.

History--Penn dissertations.

Local Subjects:

Penn dissertations--History.

History--Penn dissertations.

0332.

0631.

Physical Description:

368 pages

Contained In:

Dissertation Abstracts International 56-08A.

System Details:

Mode of access: World Wide Web.

text file

Summary:

This study traces the circumstances that allowed the imagination of militant Hindu cultural and political identities in Lucknow between 1880 and 1930. It documents the efforts of men active in the public sphere to create a larger and more empowering role for themselves in the city through redefining codes of respectability, and creating for themselves a middle class identity distinct from that of the traditional and new elites of colonial Lucknow, as well as the lower classes. Based on empirical data gathered from the archives of the colonial state, and a close reading of the writings of educated men active in Lucknow's public sphere, this dissertation describes the multiple responses of such activists to the dislocations and possibilities created by colonial rule in Lucknow. A search for sources of greater empowerment and respect led Hindu middle class activists to find in an assertive, public Hindu religiosity, the locus of an empowering identity. Such constructions of Hindu religiosity were not necessarily antagonistic to Muslims. It was at times when Hindu activists perceived challenges to their hegemonic projects from parallel projects among Muslims, that a militant Hindu identity came to be constructed around hostility towards Muslims. Through a close study of Lucknow, this dissertation argues that modern political and cultural identities in colonial India were intimately connected with the concerns and politics of middle class activists. The articulation of a militant Hindu identity however, was only one of the many modes of empowerment available to these activists. The same concerns that drove middle class activists to articulate identities around militant Hindu constructions, also led them to endorse other ideological and political agenda which undercut their own communal constructions. Middle class politics, as much as it contributed to the rhetoric and politics of a militant Hindu identity, also placed limits on such constructions. The social base and ideological orientation of middle class activists, therefore ensured that identities they forged through their interventions in the public sphere remained shifting, protean and impermanent constructs.

Notes:

Thesis (Ph.D. in History) -- University of Pennsylvania, 1995.

Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 56-08, Section: A, page: 3265.

Adviser: David Ludden.

Local Notes:

School code: 0175.

Access Restriction:

Restricted for use by site license.