Making the 'Woman'

Sutapa Dutta is a Professor of English at Gargi College, University of Delhi. Her research interests and publications are focused on 18th- and 19th-century writings and cover gender, education and identity in colonial India. She is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, London, and was a Fellow at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study (IIAS), Shimla, from 2018 to 2020. She has authored British Women Missionaries in Bengal, 1793–1861, British Women Travellers: Empire and Beyond, 1770–1870 (ed.) and Mapping India: Transitions and Transformations, 18th–19th Century (co-ed). Her latest book is titled Disciplined Subjects: Schooling in Colonial Bengal. Shivangini Tandon is an Assistant Professor in History at Women’s College, Aligarh Muslim University. Her research interests include Early modern South Asian history, Feminist theory and questions of Language. She did her B.A. and M.A. from St. Stephen’s College, PhD in History from Delhi University and is a former Visiting Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Germany. She has been invited to many national/international forums as a speaker. Her articles have been published in edited books and journals like the Indian Historical Review, Journal of South Asian History & Culture and by Nehru Memorial, New Delhi. She is the recipient of prestigious fellowships/awards like the Max Planck India Mobility Grant, Sanwa Bank Scholarship and the ICHR foreign travel grant.

Introduction Part I –The Private and the Public Worlds 1. Interrogating the Colonial categorization of female dancers: The case of Hafizas in Kashmir 2. Redefining the ‘Private’ as ‘Public’: Representation of the Awadhi zenana as an instrument of the state in the Ishqnama Part II – Questioning the Normative 3. The Politics of ‘becoming’ a Mirza: Shifting masculine norms and gender binary in the Mughal society 4. Virangana women: Dalit counter-histories of 1857 5. Gender and ‘Tribal’ identity in western India 6. Could Kali be Bharat Mata? Interrogating iconicity in Indian goddesses Part III – The Problematic ‘Others’ 7. Looking beyond a glorified past: Re-examining the category of the Tawaif in eighteenth--century Awadh 8. Re-Imagining Tawaifs: A study of courtesans in eighteenth-century Delhi 9. Leaving a lineage in stone: Eunuchs in socio-spatial setup of Mughal India Part IV – Narratives of Femininity 10. Situating Women in Tamil Mahabharatas: Questioning Frames, Breaking Moulds 11. Conceptualising the girl child in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Bengal through Aagomoni songs 12. The emerging ‘Woman’: Women’s writing and the contours of domesticity and femininity in colonial Assam