Thesis (doctoral)--Georg-August-Universität zu Göttingen, 1917. / Includes bibliographical references (p. [126]-128).

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On September 27, 1947, another page was added to the long and complex history of the Christian Church. At that time in St. George's Cathedral, Madras, South India, a union was constituted giving birth to the Church of South India. [...]

This thesis is an analytic study of specific patterns of religious thought in early south India as found in the earliest extant literary texts in Tamil, one of the classical languages of India and one of the oldest living languages of the world. commonly known in the Tamil tradition as the cankaa literature, this corpus of poetry is generally assigned to the early centuries of the Comaon Era, and is thought of as constituting the classical heritage of Taail culture. There has not been a major attempt to investigate the importance of this reaarkable body of literature to the development of religious thought in south India, a region which is widely acknowledged as the birthplace of a number of religious movements including the great devotional govement of the early medieval ties, called the bhaktl religion. The reluctance on the part of historians of Indian religious thought to take up the study of classical Tamil texts was partly due to a perception that the classical Tamil texts were essentially 'secular', and, therefore, of not much interest to a historian of religious thought. I had, therefore, to begin the thesis with a historiographical critique showing how limited and limiting that perception was and suggesting that, whatever unique features that classical Tamil texts may have, they are not unyielding to the queries of a student of religion. In addition to other types of poems, there are a few explicitly religious poems which are regarded by tradition as part of the classical corpus. Taking my initial cues from those poems, I have isolated three central themes in the literature, namely space, hero, and gift around which the religious thought of the culture can be discerned. By a careful and selective analysis of the so-called 'secular' poems in the corpus, and through an analysis of sections of the major grammatical treatise of the classical period, have shown that the thought underlying these three themes was integral to classical Tamil culture. The thesis has in the end a dual purpose. Its stated purpose is to assess the importance of the period of the classical Tamil texts in religious history, but it also indirectly demonstrates the need for a fresh approach to the study of early Tamil literature. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

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This thesis interrogates the emergence of a universal modern idea of childhood in the Madras Presidency between 1920 and 1942. It considers the construction and uses of ‘childhood’ as a conceptual category and the ways in which this informed intervention in the lives of children, particularly in the spheres of education and juvenile justice. Against a background of calls for national self-determination, the thesis considers elite debates about childhood as specifically ‘Indian’, examining the ways in which ‘the child’ emerged in late colonial South India as an object to be reformed and as a ‘human becoming’ or future citizen of an independent nation. Social reform in late colonial India is often assumed to be an area of conflict, particularly informed by racial difference. Children are seen as key targets in the competition between the colonial state and Indian politicians and professionals. However, a detailed study of the 1920 Madras Children Act and 1920 Elementary Education Act reveals the development of consensual decisions in regard to child welfare and the expansion of a ‘social’ realm, which existed outside the political. Dyarchy profoundly changed the nature of government and in policy areas related to children the ‘state’ was Indian in character, action and personnel. This thesis contends that the discursive emergence of ‘the child’ was complicated when legislation was implemented. By tracing implementation it demonstrates the extent to which modern childhood was a symbolic claim, rather than political commitment to children. Tracing the interactions between adults in authority - whether as parents, teachers, politicians or civil society activists – the thesis explores the extent to which the avowedly universal category of childhood was subsumed beneath other identities based on class, caste and gender. Understanding childhood through a variety of administration reports, political debates and pedagogical journals reflects the views and actions of adults. By utilising the remembered experience of middle-class children in autobiographies and the layered archival evidence of aristocratic children under the jurisdiction of the Court of Wards, the thesis balances adult discourses with an awareness of children as historical agents. It considers the ways in which children learned, played and interacted with each other. Finally, therefore, it charts the limits of adult authority and the ways differing identities were experienced in the lives of children in southern India in the early twentieth century.

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 (M.A.)--University of Hong Kong, 1993.

Thesis (D. Min.)--Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, 1995. / Abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 194-202).