Hovedopgave. / Format: PDF. Bibl.

Masteropgave. / Format: PDF. Bibl.

Master's thesis. / Format: PDF. Bibl.

Master's thesis. / Format: PDF. Bibl.

Dissertation. / Database: Nordic Web Publications. Format: PDF. Bibl.

This report demonstrates how encounters between readers, writers and editors of a low-brow genre of Urdu fiction, create an affective space of belonging. This genre is published in commercial monthly magazines (commonly known as women’s digests) that contain narratives of feminine domesticity, primarily written by and for women, in Pakistan. Drawing on ethnographic work (archival and interviews) with authors, readers and editors of two monthlies, this study traces the contours of digest community as an affective space of belonging that provides a ‘complex of confirmation and consolation’ on how to be a woman in Pakistan’s changing social milieu. It further argues that recent proliferation of cell phones has led to a new sensibility in this community that has its own rhythm of sound. Previously readers would communicate through published letters mediated by editors. However, now there is direct contact between these two groups, through cell phones. Digest narratives are now also being drawn from experiences readers share with authors over cell phone conversations. This sharing is not factual as such, but rather an affective exchange of feelings about facts. Thus, these conversations can be seen as a shared emotional experience where the lack of visual cues regarding social class, age and ethnicity (since readers and writers rarely meet each other) leads to voices becoming just that – voices that share life stories and experiences. There is thus a transient coming together of women who are mostly unrelated by kinship or ethnicity; and a sociality is formed between strangers with its own sensory feel of rhythm and sound, through the medium of the cell phone. This work contributes to interdisciplinary scholarship on how media and technology is a negotiation between material properties of technologies being introduced and the particular effects in forming new affects and sensibilities; and how dominant representations of Muslim women as a singular and stable category of analysis, can be spoken back to, by highlighting their myriad voices and understanding them beyond the usual tropes of victimhood and emancipation. / text

Scholarship on education and social reform has studied how communities with a history of literacy and employment in pre-colonial state administrations adjusted to the new socio-political order brought about by the British Empire in India. My work shifts the attention to the Indian aristocracy and mercantile communities and examines why they promoted modern education. I argue that rulers of Indian states adapted to the colonial environment quite effectively. Instead of a break from the past, traditional ideas of rajadharma (duties of a king) evolved and made room for reformist social and economic policies. This dissertation examines why many Indian princes (kings and queens) adopted liberal policies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I argue that English-educated rulers of Indian states became reformers and modernizers to enhance their monarchical authority. The main audience for princes was their own state population, neighboring princes, imperial officials, and Indian journalists and politicians. I have carried out research at government archives and public and private libraries in India and the United Kingdom. Sources used include official records and correspondence, annual administrative reports, newspaper accounts, social reform journals, and weeklies and monthlies dedicated to educational topics. I have also consulted memoirs and biographies of kings, queens, diwans (prime ministers) and merchants. My source material is in English and Gujarati. I draw evidence from princely states across India with a focus on Hindu Rajput and Pathan Muslim states in the Gujarat (specifically Saurashtra) region of western India, neighboring the former Bombay Presidency. Due to Gujarat's strong mercantilist tradition, commercial groups played an influential role in society. I examine how and why merchants in princely states supported their ruler's educational policies. I also discuss how mercantile philanthropy crossed political and religious boundaries with the Gujarati (Hindu, Muslim and Jain) diaspora across India, Africa and Burma supporting educational institutions in Gujarat. My dissertation examines the interactions between the English-educated upper caste Hindus, the Anglicized Rajput rulers and the Gujarati merchants to understand how they all contributed to the shaping of modern Gujarati society. / text

This dissertation analyzes how governance and community-based politics of claims in marginalized Muslim neighborhoods of Mumbai are continually reconfigured in relation to one another. By tracing this relationship, I problematize conceptualizations of governmental forms and community that don't adequately attend to their co-constitution in practice. More specifically, I examine the intersections between state practices and claims of belonging in Mumbai neighborhoods inhabited by Muslims who, impelled by regional economic inequalities, immigrated to the city from North India and other parts of the country. A large number of them traditionally belong to artisanal communities and are today engaged in the informal sector of the economy. I am interested in understanding how competing and converging claims are made to locality, urban space, labor, and caste in the interactions between these working-class Muslim communities and the state in a city that has become highly segregated along religious and regional lines. I argue that state and marginalized community in minoritized areas are not defined by independence and isolation, but by a relationship of co-generation marked by convergence and contradiction. My analysis of the interactions between community forms and state practices explores modes of laying claim to localizing forms of belonging with respect to urban space, public religiosity, histories of labor, kinship, and 'backward' caste politics. / Anthropology

My dissertation, The New Voyager: Theory and Practice of South Asian Literary Modernisms, investigates how literary modernisms in Bengali, Hindi, and Indian English functioned as much as a turning away and remixing of earlier literary traditions as a journey of engagement between the individual writer and his or her response to and attempts to re-create the modern world. This thesis explores how theories and practices of literary modernism developed in Bengali, Hindi, and Indian English in the early to mid-20th century, and explores the representations and debates surrounding literary modernisms in journals such as Kallol, Kavita, and Krittibas in Bengali, the Nayi Kavita journal and the Tar Saptak group in Hindi, and the Writers Workshop group in English. Theories of modernism and translation as proposed by South Asian literary critics such as Dipti Tripathi, Acharya Nand Dulare Bajpai, Buddhadeva Bose, and Bhola Nath Tiwari are contrasted to the manifestos of modernism found in journals such as Krittibas and against Agyeya's defense of experimentalism (prayogvad) from the Tar Saptak anthology. The dissertation then goes on to discuss how literary modernisms in South Asia occupied a vital space between local and global traditions, formal and canonical concerns, and between social engagement and individual expression. In doing so, this thesis notes how the study of modernist practices and theory in Bengali, Hindi, and English provides insight into the pluralistic, multi-dimensional, and ever-evolving cultural sphere of modern South Asia beyond the suppositions of postcolonial binaries and monolingual paradigms.

Dissertation Advisor: Parimal G. Patil Elon Goldstein