1 option
The sexual life of English : caste and desire in modern India / Shefali Chandra.
LIBRA PE3502.I6 C44 2012
Available from offsite location
- Format:
- Book
- Author/Creator:
- Chandra, Shefali, 1973-
- Language:
- English
- Subjects (All):
- English language--Social aspects--India.
- English language.
- English language--India--History.
- Women--Education--India--History.
- Women.
- English language--Study and teaching--India--History.
- Language and sex--India.
- Language and sex.
- Language and languages.
- Social aspects.
- English language--Study and teaching.
- History.
- Women--Education.
- English language--Social aspects.
- India--Languages--Social aspects.
- India.
- Physical Description:
- 275 pages ; 24 cm
- Place of Publication:
- Durham : Duke University Press, 2012.
- Summary:
- In The Sexual Life of English, Shefali Chandra examines how English became an Indian language. She rejects the idea that English was fully formed before its life in India or that it was imposed from without. Rather, by drawing attention to sexuality and power, Chandra argues that the English language was produced through conflicts over caste, religion, and class. Sentiments and experiences of desire, respectability, conjugality, status, consumption, and fashion came together to create the Indian history of English. The language was shaped by the sexual experiences of Indians and by native attempts to discipline the normative sexual subject. Focusing on the years between 1850 and 1930, Chandra scrutinizes the English-education project as Indians gained the power to direct it themselves. She delves into the history of schools, the composition of the student bodies, and disagreements about curricula; the way that English-educated subjects wrote about English; and debates in English and Marathi popular culture. Chandra shows how concerns over linguistic change were popularly voiced in a sexual idiom, how English and the vernacular were separated through the vocabulary of sexual difference, and how the demand for matrimony naturalized the social location of the English language. Book jacket.
- Contents:
- Learning gender, knowing English : an introduction
- "The prudent and cautious engrafting of English upon our female population" : pedagogy and performativity
- The language of the bedroom : mimicry, masculinity and the sexual power of English
- "A new generation of hipless and breastless women is coming to the forefront in Europe and America" : literature, social class and the wider world of English
- "I shall read pretty English stories to my mother and translate them into Marathi for her..." : widowhood, virtue and the secularization of caste
- "I began to wonder why I had ever begun to learn English" : desire, labor and the trans-regional orientation of caste
- The first Indian woman to taste "the sweets of an English education" : Dosebai Jessawalla and the "march of advancement in the face of obloquy"
- Epilogue : "I am an Indian. I have no language" : Parvatibai Athavale and the limits to English.
- Notes:
- Includes bibliographical references and index.
- ISBN:
- 9780822352600
- 0822352605
- 9780822352273
- 0822352273
- OCLC:
- 748336565
The Penn Libraries is committed to describing library materials using current, accurate, and responsible language. If you discover outdated or inaccurate language, please fill out this feedback form to report it and suggest alternative language.