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This thesis examines the reform ideas and efforts of Daud Shah, a Muslim socio-religious reformer in the Madras Presidency during the twentieth century. Shah published a journal, Dar ul-Islam (World of Islam), which he used as a medium to propagate his ideas and advocate reforms among Muslims. Socio-religious reform efforts among Muslims in the Madras Presidency have received very limited scholarly attention. But the purpose of this thesis goes beyond merely focusing on a neglected area of scholarship. Shah belonged to a small class of Western-educated Muslim professionals. This thesis will demonstrate how Shah’s reform efforts differed from those advocated by the aristocracy and the merchant elite. This thesis will analyze the relationship between Shah and the national-level reform movements among Muslims. Shah’s reform and fundraising efforts also reveal the close links between Muslims in Tamil Nadu and Southeast Asia. Finally, the thesis will show the influence of print technology on reform movements among Muslims. / text

Between 1860 and 1900 the British Government in India – along with many other areas of the world – enacted numerous legal acts which superficially sought to prevent or control the transmission of disease. The implementation of legislative efforts attempted to identify and control subcultures that were marked as transmitters of infection. Thus legislation combined medical, legal and cultural concepts which formed the framework for the construction of societal control of infections. The Madras Presidency offers two tangible examples of this association of medicine, law and society. The Cantonment Regulations (1864), which were the origin of the Contagious Diseases Act (1868), were introduced to control venereal disease, while the Lepers Act (1898) was directed at leprosy sufferers. These laws embodied the official response to two diseases which attracted significant attention in Victorian culture. Evidenced within these statutes are the cultural markers of the society which engendered them. This thesis compares these two acts and explores how these acts were the product of similar cultural mores. A thematic approach has been adopted to examine how these acts are consequently coloured by characterisations of gender, race, class, colonialism, politics and morality. Leprosy and syphilis are biologically unrelated diseases. Prior to the twentieth century however, difficulties in diagnosis saw these two diseases often confused with one another. Additionally, these diseases were deeply stigmatizing and carried an imagined significance out of proportion to their biological impact. This thesis analyses the way in which this legislation reified the corporeal form of sufferers. A visibly diseased body was constructed, which then allowed authorities to focus their efforts on the control of specifically identified groups, segregate them and render the visible invisible. As a consequence of these pieces of legislation, marginalised groups were stigmatised as the visible carriers of disease and subjected to governmental restrictions by statutes that were embedded with the culture mores of the British in India, providing an illustration not so much of sanitary control but social control.

Thesis (D. Min.)--Columbia International University, 2000. / Abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 137-141).

Students at a certain university often develop their own in-group language which only insiders will understand. This phenomenon is very distinctive in IIT Madras. My MA thesis tries to describe and classify the student slang spoken at IIT Madras. This classification is done according to etymological origin and applied word formation patterns on the one hand and according to context in which the terms are used on the other. The results are based on three questionnaires conducted at IIT Madras and via email correspondence.

This thesis investigates the dynamics between devadasi women and judges in the Anglo-Indian court in the Madras Presidency of 19th-century colonial India. The thesis focuses on how the devadasis navigated the colonial legal system and the strategies they utilized as well as the role of the judges' preconceived notions and prejudice in determining the decisions they made.

Tamil cinema is marked by its remarkable output of films and reception across the globe. More than 5000 films were produced in Tamil during the last century alone, and Tamil films have a longer and denser history of reception among the South East Asian diaspora--in countries like Sri Lanka, Malaysia and Singapore, mainly among the Tamilians and other South Indians--than films made in any other Indian language. The studios of Madras, arguably the most influential in shaping a film industry in terms of its form and content outside the classical Hollywood system, were at the center of Tamil cinema's productivity during the defining decades of the 1940s and 50s, a period marked by British Rule, the Second World War, India's independence, and the electoral politics of the Dravidian movement. However, a sustained and scholarly study of this history has been marked by its absence, primarily due to the enormity of the task, the challenges associated with data collection, and the availability of archival materials. Therefore, my primary objective in this dissertation is to fill this void, and study the most eventful period in the history of the Madras studios (1940-57) when they produced their landmark and seminal films. An understanding of the history of the studios and a detailed reading of their major films sheds light on the complex intersection of the cultural, economic, and political factors which shaped the studios and their owners, and the type of productions they were interested in. Tamil cinema is often criticized as verbose and theatrical mainly due to lack of parallel and art cinema movements like in neighboring states of Kerala and Karnataka. The "Madrasi Picture" has become the convenient way to label a melodramatic tearjerker juxtaposed with comedy. My challenge to this perception in this thesis, therefore, is to foreground Tamil Cinema's theatrical roots embedded in folk traditions and the Parsi theatre, and its ability to navigate through multiple influences, and yet retain a specificity of its own in terms of innovative genres, narrative devices, and formats which keep significantly influencing Indian popular cinema.

Zugl.: Copenhagen, Univ., Diss., 2006

Thesis (D. Min.)--Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, 1993. / Abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 216-233).