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Drawing from the rich records of Protestant British women’s missionary societies, this dissertation explores the motivations, goals, efforts, and experiences of British women who pursued careers as missionary doctors and nurses dedicated to serving Indian women in the decades before Indian independence in 1947. While most scholarship on women missionaries focuses on the imperial heyday of the Victorian and Edwardian eras, this study highlights women medical missionaries in the late colonial period and argues for the significance of this transitional moment, a time of deepening change in medical science and clinical practice, imperial rule and nationalist politics, gender relations, and the nature of the missionary enterprise in both India and Britain. Analysis of the relationship between missionaries in India and their managers in Britain reveals the tensions among women who shared a common commitment, yet brought different perspectives and priorities to women’s missionary work. A life-cycle approach to work and career allows examination of individual women’s development as healthcare professionals and as missionaries. Telling the stories of missionaries’ everyday experiences shows that a sense of purpose, preparation, professionalism, and positive role models sustained those women who were able to meet the great demands of medical missionary work. These missionaries often overcame obstacles and challenges through negotiation and collaboration with patients and their families as well as reflection and learning from experience. Many came to believe they had achieved measurable progress and made a positive difference in the quality of Indian women’s lives. The missionaries’ commitment to Christian medical service for Indian women reached beyond the colonial era and eventually embraced a transfer of leadership to Indian Christians. [WU1] [WU1]Your abstract will not be accepted if it exceeds the limit by even one word.

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This thesis investigates the significance of Persian learning in Britain and India during the period of colonial expansion under the East India Company, from 1757 to 1857. It seeks to situate Persian in its wider social context in north India, and understand the significance and function of the language during a period which is typically described in terms of the decline of the Persianate world. It does so by studying Persian literary production and language-learning by a range of actors at different sites in north India. By examining the presence of Persianate texts and individuals in spaces and endeavours which are typically classified as modern (orientalist textual production in the colony, the rise of linguistic studies, colonial education and nineteenth-century Indian printing), this thesis emphasizes the ways in which Persianate relationships and sensibilities shaped these sites of Indian modernity, and were themselves altered in the process. This thesis shows that the reasons for the continued usage of Persian in late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century India went beyond its symbolic value as a marker of earlier Mughal power. Persian played an important role in shaping and constructing cosmopolitan literary and scholarly identities, as well as enabling spatial and social mobility. In so doing, this thesis hopes to contribute to the historiography of the Persianate world, as well as the histories of language, printing and education in colonial South Asia more broadly. In making these arguments, this thesis suggests a reappraisal of the ways in which the relationship between Indian modernity and cosmopolitan cultures now seen as 'classical' - such as that of Persian - is conceived. Rather than viewing Persian as a mere symbol of Mughal rule, a socially-grounded understanding of the Indian and colonial engagement with Persian is suggested. Understanding Persian in its social context in India, and recognizing the variety of spaces, languages and groups it interacted with challenges any neat categorization of the language as 'classical' or 'foreign' to India, or in opposition to vernacular or indigenous languages.

<p>"On Decolonizing the Mind" is generated at the juncture ofpostcolonial studies, Asian/ American studies, and globalization and transnational studies. Exploring literary imagination as an essential part of the social imaginary—one that not only reflects social realities but also fosters decolonizing imagination—I examine literary texts dealing with postcolonial issues in India, Ireland, and Korea in order to demonstrate how literary texts that revisit and rewrite colonial histories contribute to the on-going project of decolonizing the mind: representing and imagining otherwise. I argue that literary representations of colonial histories serve as an alternative historiography against the established discourses of colonial histories.</p> <p>I offer critical readings ofliterary texts such as Imaginary Maps, Comfort Woman, A Gesture Life, Translations, and Dictee. Mahasweta Devi's Imaginary Maps represents the postcolonial condition of indigenous peoples (particularly women) in India. Devi's text highlights her activism on behalf of indigenous peoples in India and leads us to think about the possibilities and limits of literary representation and imagination in engaging with oppressive social realities and creating viable solutions. The ordeals of "comfort women" during the Pacific War, which have begun to receive global recognition since the early 1990s, is an unresolved postcolonial issue in Korea and in many parts of East and South East Asian regions. Among the growing literature on this controversy, the literary representation of comfort women by North American writers demonstrates that the legacy of comfort women is a transnational issue that demands global justice. Focusing on Nora Okja Keller's Comfort Woman and Chang-rae Lee's A Gesture Life, I analyze how literary representations of comfort women can be an effective medium through which to witness their cultural trauma. My study of Brian Friel's Translations and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictee tackles the colonial encounter in Irish and Korean histories, focusing on the colonial policies ofimposing colonizers' languages on the colonized. Friel and Cha show different ways in which to find voices of difference, resistance, and subversion in a language not their own.</p> <p>My comparative study aims to make sense of the complicated ways in which national issues (indigenous peoples in India, the comfort women issue in Korea (and East and South East Asia), the postcolonial turmoil in Northern Ireland, and the postcolonial context of the United States) are closely related to global issues (colonialism, imperialism, global capitalism, and globalization). I claim that postcolonialism in the Western academy has focused too much on European colonization, especially British colonialism; we need to take into account the fact that Japan was a powerful colonial power and then to compare the effects of that colonization—and postcolonization—on places like Korea with British colonialism in India, as well as closer to home in Ireland. I hope that my study contributes to the elaboration of a transnational literacy that can offer a responsible form of cultural explanation through which to explore the interrelations between the national and the postcolonial (or the global).</p> / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

This dissertation is a historical- anthropological account of political cartooning in colonial and postcolonial India. Through a focus on representational politics and biography I have situated the history and practice of cartooning in India to unfold the link between politics, the making of a moral aesthetic and modernity. I am attentive to the shifts in this link by tracing the movement in three historical phases: colonial, nationalist, and postcolonial. These three interconnected parts of my dissertation span a period from the 1870s when vernacular versions of the British Punch began to be produced in colonial India and contemporary neo- liberal India that is seeing a profusion of pocket cartoons in local newspaper editions. In organizing the narrative in three political frameworks - the colonial, nationalist, and postcolonial I discuss the circuits of global interconnectedness through which a shifting moral aesthetic of the cartoon came to be formulated at different times and places in Indian politics. As an everyday cultural production, a focus on the cartoon in terms of "what the cultural consumer makes" as "a production of poiesis - but a hidden one" (de Certeau 1984) illuminates the liminal (Turner) dimension of the cartoon. Additionally, by situating the cartoon as a discursive site (Terdiman 1985) I want to draw attention to new analytical spaces it generates for the discussion and construction of democracy, secularism, minority rights and the modern state. In order to grasp the generative and interpretive dimension of the cartoon I point to three concepts: liminal form, moral aesthetic, and tactical modernity. These concepts open a space to think through the hegemonic processes that come into play at the cultural site of the cartoon and enable and analysis of the cartoon as a site generative of hegemonic processes. This attention to the cartoon as a discursive site in the public sphere highlights the transformative circuit from laughter to debate, from visual to written, and a moral aesthetic that gets switched on through the interpretive dilemmas and representational practices of the cartoon. / text

This thesis examines the development of the Leftist movement in British Punjab and the insights it provides into the political spaces it inhabited and the actors it engaged with. Broadly speaking, this is an attempt at uncovering lesser fragments that offer the possibility of complicating our understanding of Punjabi and South Asian History. In doing so, I seek to uncover a socio-political arena which played host to a multiplicity of contested identities, notions of sovereignty, and political objectives. I thus seek to explore this complex and fluid arena through the study of a variety of movements and intellectual strands, all of which can collectively be labelled as the ‘Left.’ I begin by situating the Punjabi Left within the wider global arena and then shift to examining it within the province itself. I then explore the Left’s acrimonious relationship with the Colonial State as well as its tortured engagements with ‘nationalist’ and ‘communitarian’ movements. Taken together, this thesis, aside from enhancing our understanding of the ‘Left’ itself, also contributes to regional studies in general and questions historiographical demarcations and the categories that are normatively employed in standard political histories.

This thesis explores the gendered dynamics of industrialisation in the late Ottoman Empire and British India. It examines the ways in which gendered notions of skill, waged work, domesticity and technology shaped employment patterns, labour processes and politics in silk factories in Bursa and cotton mills in Bombay between 1850 and 1910. The project undermines the notion that women's labour was incidental to the development of large-scale factory enterprise in Ottoman and Indian lands. I argue that the confinement of women to labour-intensive and low-paid occupations within and outside the factory brought down wages and provided flexibility to mechanised production. This flexibility was key to the survival and rapid growth of the export-oriented industries in Bursa and Bombay. The common mechanisms of women's marginalisation in the workforce included segregation, masculinisation of machinery, vertical organisation of trade unions, male-controlled recruitment processes and the household division of labour. The extent to which women influenced employment practices depended on the availability of external mediation as well as their means to subvert notions of victimhood, domesticity, honour and duty. In connecting the Ottoman and Indian paths to industrialisation from a gender perspective, the project destabilises male-centric approaches to the global history of economy, labour and technology.

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The cultural venue of European exhibitions in the late-nineteenth century enabled the promotion of the modern nationhoods of imperial powers. This study examines the official attempts of Britain to project its imperial power and modern nationhood through exhibits of colonial Indian “tradition” in London. It traces the historical dynamics of such Indian displays in three exhibitions: the 1886 Colonial and Indian Exhibition, the 1908 Franco-British Exhibition, and the 1924 Empire Exhibition. The juxtaposition of Indian “tradition” and British “modernity” at the exhibitions denoted India’s inferior “difference” from Britain, and thus the necessity of imperial rule in India. The exhibitions also evidenced the tensions of such notions with those of Indian modernity, especially by the inter-war period. Chapter One examines how the spatial and architectural landscapes of the exhibitions made visible the hierarchies of British imperial rule in India. Chapter Two discusses exhibits of India’s supposedly pre-industrial socioeconomic conditions. Chapter Three assesses the ethnography of the exhibitions, and how they denoted the racial inferiority of Indian “natives” at the same time that they recognized the political power of Indian princes and middle-class elites.