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Gender and violence in British India : the road to Amritsar, 1914-1919 / by Robert McLain.

Van Pelt Library DS480.4 .M35 2014
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Format:
Book
Author/Creator:
McLain, Robert.
Language:
English
Subjects (All):
World War, 1914-1918--Social aspects--India.
World War, 1914-1918.
Social conditions.
Relations.
Imperialism--Social aspects.
History.
Imperialism.
Violence.
Masculinity--Political aspects.
Masculinity.
India--Politics and government--1857-1919.
India.
Politics and government.
Amritsar Massacre, Amritsar, India, 1919.
Masculinity--Political aspects--India--History--20th century.
Violence--India--History--20th century.
Imperialism--Social aspects--India--History--20th century.
Great Britain--Relations--India.
Great Britain.
India--Relations--Great Britain.
India--History.
India--Social conditions--20th century.
Physical Description:
170 pages ; 25 cm
Place of Publication:
New York, NY : Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.
Summary:
"By the outbreak of the Great War, conventional wisdom in the British Empire held that the Briton alone possessed the 'manly' traits of logic and self-control necessary for good governance. Coupled with this was the belief that India's western-educated nationalist elite suffered from a crippling effeminacy of body and mind that precluded political power and independence. During the First World War, however, the colony sent over one million troops abroad to fight, fundamentally upsetting this symmetry and allowing Indian nationalists to challenge the tenets of colonial masculinity. What had been a moment of imperial unity in 1914 deteriorated into an increasingly bitter dispute over the relationship between 'native' effeminacy and India's postwar fitness for self-rule. In this groundbreaking, carefully argued study, author Robert McLain demonstrates that this dispute assumed a rhetorical ferocity that culminated in the actual physical violence of the Amritsar Massacre of 1919, when British led troops shot hundreds of unarmed Indian civilians. In this way, the Empire's reliance on gender as an ideological apparatus was deeply interwoven with the use of violence as an inherent and persistent feature of imperial power"--Provided by publisher.
Contents:
Resituating gender and violence during the Great War
The violent Mahatma : Gandhi and the rehabilitation of Indian manhood
Measures of manliness : the martial races and the wartime politics of effeminacy
Frontline masculinity : the Indian Corps on the Western Front, 1914-1915
The road to Amritsar
Epilogue : The historical stakes of new imperial history.
Notes:
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN:
1137448539
9781137448538
OCLC:
883747120
Publisher Number:
99960254436

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