Amitav Ghosh's In an Antique Land is a text that is best known for giving a home, a personality, ... more Amitav Ghosh's In an Antique Land is a text that is best known for giving a home, a personality, and a profession to a pure subaltern presence – Bomma, the Indian slave of a Jewish trader named Abraham Ben Yiju who lived variously in Cairo, Aden, and Mangalore during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Ghosh embarks on this project after coming across a small footnote in a book on medieval Jewish traders in a university library, and going on to form an entire narrative around the 'slave of Ms. H.6.' However, Bomma is not the only slave that Ghosh comes across in the process of his research. He also discovers that Ben Yiju was married to a manumitted slave named Ashu. However, Ghosh does not talk about Ashu at any considerable length in his book. In this paper, I argue that a number of interesting questions could be asked about Ashu, in the same manner as Ghosh had asked about Bomma. What tradition of slavery allows master to wed slave, under what conditions could such an inter-racial marriage have taken place in medieval India, what might have been the reaction of Ashu's family to such a marriage, what language would Ben Yiju and Ashu have spoken at home – these are the kind of questions I ask through this paper, and I cautiously speculate on the answers as well, just as Ghosh has done in his book.
Scholarship on prominent women's organizations of the early twentieth century highlights how ... more Scholarship on prominent women's organizations of the early twentieth century highlights how American and European suffragists participated in and published reports about one another's activities. Less well-known are the exciting circuits of exchange that took place between women in Asia and Africa in spaces emerging out of colonial modernity. In this article, I explore how such circuits evoke cultural institutions embedded within shared histories of courtly patronage of the performing arts and rhetoric. To this end, I posit the mehfil as an alternative paradigm to capture how women's ideational networks operated within the Perso-Arabic sphere in the first half of the twentieth century. The mehfil, in addition to delineating neglected circuits of women's intellectual exchanges, also demonstrates how such exchanges, if attended to, pose certain tensions with known feminist histories. By broadening the definition of who we think of as early women activists or as pionee...
Paul reads the pioneering South Asian feminist utopian writer Begum Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s Sul... more Paul reads the pioneering South Asian feminist utopian writer Begum Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s Sultana’s Dream (1908) and পরাগ (Padmarag) (1924) as employing the rhetorical devices of inversion and prolepsis to critique the power imbalances in colonial Bengali society. The first, she argues, advocates a radical feminist ethics, while the second is rooted in a feminine ethics of care. In Paul’s reading, both novels problematise culturally specific notions of masculinity and femininity and centralise the ideal of the feminist woman who has loving and nurturing relationships with other women, as opposed to the feminine woman who lives only for men and her own children.
This thesis examines women writers indexed as 'Bengali' and 'Muslim' in the late ... more This thesis examines women writers indexed as 'Bengali' and 'Muslim' in the late colonial era and locates their exclusion (abarodh) from the hegemonic canon of Bengali literature. Reading against the grain of a literary modernity built around male Hindu writers' work, it introduces mehfii as a heuristic device that makes these women writers more accessible to present-day readers through their shared literary-cultural genealogies. Mehfii enables the discovery of wider networks of circulation and exchange in Asia and Africa, which these writers participate in and where their shared experiences, concerns, and politics emerge as the bases for interpersonal and empathetic dialogue.
Amitav Ghosh's In an Antique Land is a text that is best known for giving a home, a personality, ... more Amitav Ghosh's In an Antique Land is a text that is best known for giving a home, a personality, and a profession to a pure subaltern presence – Bomma, the Indian slave of a Jewish trader named Abraham Ben Yiju who lived variously in Cairo, Aden, and Mangalore during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Ghosh embarks on this project after coming across a small footnote in a book on medieval Jewish traders in a university library, and going on to form an entire narrative around the 'slave of Ms. H.6.' However, Bomma is not the only slave that Ghosh comes across in the process of his research. He also discovers that Ben Yiju was married to a manumitted slave named Ashu. However, Ghosh does not talk about Ashu at any considerable length in his book. In this paper, I argue that a number of interesting questions could be asked about Ashu, in the same manner as Ghosh had asked about Bomma. What tradition of slavery allows master to wed slave, under what conditions could such an inter-racial marriage have taken place in medieval India, what might have been the reaction of Ashu's family to such a marriage, what language would Ben Yiju and Ashu have spoken at home – these are the kind of questions I ask through this paper, and I cautiously speculate on the answers as well, just as Ghosh has done in his book.
Scholarship on prominent women's organizations of the early twentieth century highlights how ... more Scholarship on prominent women's organizations of the early twentieth century highlights how American and European suffragists participated in and published reports about one another's activities. Less well-known are the exciting circuits of exchange that took place between women in Asia and Africa in spaces emerging out of colonial modernity. In this article, I explore how such circuits evoke cultural institutions embedded within shared histories of courtly patronage of the performing arts and rhetoric. To this end, I posit the mehfil as an alternative paradigm to capture how women's ideational networks operated within the Perso-Arabic sphere in the first half of the twentieth century. The mehfil, in addition to delineating neglected circuits of women's intellectual exchanges, also demonstrates how such exchanges, if attended to, pose certain tensions with known feminist histories. By broadening the definition of who we think of as early women activists or as pionee...
Paul reads the pioneering South Asian feminist utopian writer Begum Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s Sul... more Paul reads the pioneering South Asian feminist utopian writer Begum Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s Sultana’s Dream (1908) and পরাগ (Padmarag) (1924) as employing the rhetorical devices of inversion and prolepsis to critique the power imbalances in colonial Bengali society. The first, she argues, advocates a radical feminist ethics, while the second is rooted in a feminine ethics of care. In Paul’s reading, both novels problematise culturally specific notions of masculinity and femininity and centralise the ideal of the feminist woman who has loving and nurturing relationships with other women, as opposed to the feminine woman who lives only for men and her own children.
This thesis examines women writers indexed as 'Bengali' and 'Muslim' in the late ... more This thesis examines women writers indexed as 'Bengali' and 'Muslim' in the late colonial era and locates their exclusion (abarodh) from the hegemonic canon of Bengali literature. Reading against the grain of a literary modernity built around male Hindu writers' work, it introduces mehfii as a heuristic device that makes these women writers more accessible to present-day readers through their shared literary-cultural genealogies. Mehfii enables the discovery of wider networks of circulation and exchange in Asia and Africa, which these writers participate in and where their shared experiences, concerns, and politics emerge as the bases for interpersonal and empathetic dialogue.
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