Intimate relations : social reform and the late nineteenth-century South Asian novel / Krupa Shandilya.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Shandilya, Krupa, author.

Series:

FlashPoints (Evanston, Ill.) ; 24.

Flashpoints ; 24

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Bengali fiction--19th century--History and criticism.

Bengali fiction.

Urdu fiction--19th century--History and criticism.

Urdu fiction.

Domestic fiction--History and criticism.

Domestic fiction.

Women in literature.

Sex role in literature.

Genre:

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Physical Description:

x, 157 pages ; 23 cm.

Place of Publication:

Evanston, Illinois : Northwestern University Press, 2017.

Summary:

Intimate Relations remaps the discussion on gender and the nation in South Asia through a close study of the domestic novel as a literary genre and a tool for social reform. As a product of the intersection of literary and social reform movements, in the late nineteenth century the domestic novel became a site for literary innovation and also for rethinking women's roles in society and politics. Krupa Shandilya focuses primarily on social reform movements that negotiated the intimate relations between men and women in Hindu and Muslim society namely, the widow remarriage act in Bengal (1856) and the education of women promoted by the Aligarh movement (1858-1900). Both movements were invested in recovering woman as a "respectable" subject for the Hindu and Muslim nation, where respectability connoted asexual spirituality. While most South Asian literary scholarship has focused on a normative Hindu woman, Intimate Relations couples discussion of the representation of the widow in bhadrahk (upper-caste, middle-class) society with that of the courtesan of sharif (upper-class, Muslim, feudal) society in Bengali and Urdu novels from the 1880s to the 1920s. By drawing together their disparate histories in the context of contemporaneous social reform movements, Shandilya reflects on the similarities of Hindu and Islamic constructions of the gendered nation. Book jacket.

Contents:

At home in the world : feminist agency in the late-nineteenth century social reform novel

Desire, death, and the discourse of sati : Bankimchandra Chatterjee's Krishnakanter Uil and Rabindranath Tagore's Chokher Bali

Erotic worship and the discourse of rights : spiritual feminism in Saratchandra Chatterjee's fiction

On purdah and poetry : social reform and the status of Urdu poetry in Nazir Ahmad and Hali's fiction

Poetry, piety and performance : the politics of modesty in M.H. Ruswa's Umrao jaan ada and Junun-e-intezaar

Towards a feminist modernity : the religious-erotic politics of the modernesque novel.

ISBN:

9780810134225

0810134225

9780810134232

0810134233

OCLC:

939911330

Publisher Number:

99970484050