Coming of age in nineteenth-century India
Subtitle: the girl-child and the art of playfulness
By: Ruby Lal
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2013
Place of publication: Cambridge, [England]; New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 247
ISBN-13: 9781107030244
Subjects: Social life and customs; Domestic relations; HISTORY / Asia / India & South Asia; History; Girls; Women
Description: "In this engaging and eloquent history, Ruby Lal traces the coming of age of nineteenth-century Indian women through a critique of narratives of linear transition from girlhood to womanhood. In the north Indian patriarchal environment, women's lives were dominated by the expectations of the male universal, articulated most clearly in household chores and domestic duties. The author argues that girls and women in the early nineteenth century experienced freedoms, eroticism, adventurousness and playfulness, even within restrictive circumstances. Although women in the colonial world of the later nineteenth century continued to be agential figures, their activities came to be constrained by more firmly entrenched domestic norms. Lal skilfully marks the subtle and complex alterations in the multifaceted female subject in a variety of nineteenth-century discourses, which are elaborated in four different sites - forest, school, household and rooftop"--
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Machine generated contents note: 1. Texts, spaces, histories; 2. The woman of the forest; 3. The woman of the school; 4. The woman of the household; 5. The woman of the rooftops.