Charu Gupta

• PhD, SOAS, London
• Senior Professor at University of Delhi

In the north India of 1920s–30s, many first-generation anticolonial communists and Left intellectuals did not see any contradiction in reliance upon religion, ethical traditions and morality in a search for vocabularies of dignity, equality, just polity and social liberation. Through select writings in Hindi of Satyabhakta (1897–85), an almost forg...

Durba Mitra, Indian Sex Life: Sexuality and the Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2020, 290 pp.

This article centres on the Hindi sexology writings of a woman, Yashoda Devi, and a Shudra, Santram B.A. In the context of an efflorescence of vernacular sexology literature in early twentieth-century North India, it explicates how their writings moved along different registers, whereby they envisaged a heterosexual ethics that relied on utopian an...

Drawing on fragmentary examples from women’s histories in colonial India, this paper underlines the problems and possibilities in historiographies of modern India. Feminist scholars argue that the three terms—women, gender and sex—have often been used interchangeably. However, the commonsensical term woman is neither a natural category (of non-men)...

This article focuses on vernacular travel writings on America and Europe by Swami Satyadev ‘Parivrajak’ (1879–1961), one of the first persons to systematically write travelogues in Hindi. I argue that Parivrajak’s travel literature was part of a colonised nation’s attempt to reclaim a space of freedom, forged through the carving of ‘perfect masculi...

This collection brings together nine essays, accompanied by nine short translations, that redraw the boundaries of literary histories both temporally and spatially. The essays, rooted in the humanities and informed by interdisciplinary area studies, explore multiple linkages between forms of print culture, linguistic identities and diverse vernacul...

Santram BA (1887–1998), a Shudra caste reformer, wrote several articles and books in Hindi on sex and birth control, including translations of Mary Stopes’ writings, in the early twentieth century. This article places Santram’s vernacular writings in a larger historical context of the growth of print, which facilitated the widespread production of...

This essay presents a social history of power relations between domestic workers and their employers by examining the representations of servants in a wide array of Hindi print literature, including didactic manuals, popular magazines, reformist writings and cartoons, in the early twentieth-century North India. Exploring possibilities within repert...

In modern India, the year 2014 was marked by the ascendency of Hindu nationalist forces in politics. At a subterranean level, it was also witness to cries of "love jihad" and ghar vapasi. "Love jihad" was alleged to be a movement aimed at forcibly converting vulnerable Hindu women to Islam through trickery and marriage and ghar vapasi was a metapho...

This article explores how, in a section of upper-caste reformist writings in Hindi, in colonial north India, Dalit women came to be dominantly represented as victims. Images of the permanently polluted, evil and grotesque Dalit woman’s body gave way to images of her suffering body, which came together in iconographies of sentimentality, sympathy an...

In this article footnote 70 on page 20 should include the following: ‘Quoted in Ashutosh Kumar, “Anti-Indenture Bhojpuri Folk Songs and Poems from North India”, Man in India , 93 (4), 2013, p. 512 [509–19].’ On the same page, after the line ‘The victimized woman was glorified and acquired subjecthood only when she emulated the virtues and ideals o...

Extending the paradigms of Subaltern Studies, this paper takes up three disparate sites—didactic Hindi literature, conversions and army discourses—to provide a perspective on the disjunctive forms of representation that signified Dalit bodies in colonial north India. Through different arenas, it shows how representations constituted, and were refle...

Religious conversions by Dalits in colonial India have largely been examined as mass movements to Christianity, with an implicit focus on men. However, why did Dalit women convert? Were they just guided by their men, family, and community? This paper explores the interrelationship between caste and gender in Dalit conversions afresh through the use...

This article explores the gendered implications of the swadeshi rhetoric by focusing on how its language was creatively appropriated by the Hindu publicists of colonial United Provinces to dress up Hindu middle-class, upper-caste women in particular ways. This had implications for a new vocabulary of sartorial morality, for modern bourgeois values...

This book is about the tragic journeys and livelihood insecurities of coastal fisherfolk jailed by India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh for having entered each other’s territorial waters. While reflecting on national anxieties and the deleterious politics of boundaries, it reveals how these fisherfolk create alternative maps and a new world of...

This article focuses on disparate sites and subjects to reflect on and problematize the relationship between sexuality and the archives in colonial north India. I dwell on how ‘recalcitrant’ and hidden histories of sexuality can be gleaned by not only expanding our arenas of archives, but also by decentering and recasting colonial archives. I do so...

This article places the Dalit male body at its centre, and in the process disturbs the idea of masculinity in colonial India. It argues that ways in which caste, Dalit identities and masculinity relate to each other have not been readily recognised, in spite of a growing body of work on Dalits in the colonial period. The article explores how the Da...

The fake claim by the Hindu right that there is a "Love Jihad" organisation which is forcing Hindu women to convert to Islam through false expressions of love is similar to a campaign in the 1920s in north India against alleged "abductions". Whether 1920 or 2009, Hindu patriarchal notions appear deeply entrenched in such campaigns: images of passiv...

This paper explores the complex social and literary narratives that functioned in the name of the Dalit woman in late colonial north India. It does so by scrutinizing a literary genre of the period, namely didactic literature and domestic manuals in Hindi, which principally addressed themselves to middle class, high caste Hindu women. However, this...

This article is about the tragic journeys and livelihood insecurities of coastal fisherfolk of India and Sri Lanka, who are arrested and jailed by these countries for having entered each other's arenas. These fisherfolk are victims of defined and undefined boundaries in the seas, and increasing conflicts over renewable resources. The article questi...

The display of male sexuality, particularly through erotic male songs and dances in films like Om Shanti Om and Saawariya raises questions about gendered dynamics in popular Bollywood cinema.

The India Social Forum 2006, held in Delhi in early November was a veritable carnival - of discussions, debates and meetings on subjects ranging from migratory labour, displacement and trafficking to children's rights, special economic zones and issues of sexuality and gender - held in an atmosphere of heady optimism and attended by thousands. But...

This article questions neat dichotomies between subaltern/hegemonic and feminine/masculine, which are often made while examining the impact of modern, Western, biomedical systems on traditional, indigenous medical practices in colonial societies. It does so by studying the extensive writings of Yashoda Devi, a famous woman ayurvedic practitioner in...

Coastal fisherfolk of India and Pakistan are often arrested for crossing borders. They are victims of defined and undefined boundaries and borders in the seas, and increasing conflicts over renewable resources. These coastal conflicts need to be understood from several overlapping but distinct perspectives. Low-intensity conflicts over environmenta...

The census has always been used by communal forces to map Hindu communities, to count them, and above all to compare them with other religious communities, particularly the Muslim. Census data has been an instrument not just for enumeration, but also for comparison.

This paper explores how unconventional love was written about and expressed in late colonial north India, with special emphasis on Uttar Pradesh (then known as the United Provinces, hereafter UP), in literary genres, print media and in actual practices. It focuses on male-male sexual bondings in an urban climate, relationships between the younger b...

The attempts by the activists of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and the Hindu Jagran Manch of Kotdwar, a town in Uttaranchal, to forcefully stop Hindu women from visiting Muslim male tailors illustrate the inclination of the Hindu communalists to propagate the image of the sexually charged, lustful Muslim male, violating the pure body of the Hindu woman...

In the metaphor of nationalism, it is the female body and the many faces of 'mother' - motherland, mother tongue, motherhood - have served as the most universal and potent symbols of imagining the nation. The symbol of mother was especially effective because it could take on different meanings in different contexts. This paper examines how and why...

The modern nation has often been explicitly imagined through gendered metaphors, particularly of the female body. ‘ The many faces of ‘mother’-motherland, mother tongue, motherhood-have proved particularly potent symbols.

In the early twentieth century a moral panic of sorts gripped a section of the British and Hindu middle classes, creating anxieties regarding questions ofsexuality.’ Hindi literature and advertisements make this panic apparent. The creation of a ‘civilised’ and ‘appropriate’ literature paves the way for a new kind of aesthetics, and for the fashion...

Having largely focused on how notions of obscenity and sexuality, and the domestic, social and public spaces of women were reworked in the writings of Hindu publicists, we now turn to identity politics and the making of the ‘Other’: i.e. the relationship between Hindu identity, gender, and constructions of the Muslim male.

I have tried to show how gender was central to the creation of a sexualised and communalised Hindu identity in colonial UP. Hindu publicists sought to establish the honour, prestige and respectability of the Hindu household and family, to work out a definable community identity and a vibrant Hindu nation. The period was marked by conservative sexua...

Moving from the debates around obscenity, and high and low culture within print-which was accessible to a relatively small percentage of the population-let us look now at popular culture, oral narratives and the wider public and social spaces of women in this period. Here too the attempt to cleanse culture of perceived obscenities occupied centre s...

Hindu pamphleteers and campaigners went all out to keep Hindu women away from Muslim men, and from symbols, customs and culture seen as ‘Muslim’. Even day-to-day contact with Muslims was perceived as a serious threat to the Hindu patriarchal order and community identity, leading to a new set of instructions for Hindu women. These attitudes parallel...

Constructions of sexuality, educational reform, thrift, child care and household management were of grave social concern and scientific investigation in UP in the late-nineteenth and early- twentieth centuries. The reforming endeavour included attempts to forge an ideology of respectable middle-class and upper-caste Hindu domesticity. ~ecenstt udie...

This article' focuses on obscenity and sexually coded representations in Hindi literature of late colonial north India, with special emphasis on Uttar Pradesh (then known as the United Provinces, hereafter UP). While examining the impact of print and new literary sensibilities, it is broadly concerned with the 'moral panic' that gripped a section o...

Les AA. rappellent que les conflits politiques, les antagonismes entre les differentes communautes religieuses font partie integrante de l'histoire de l'Inde. Ils s'interessent plus particulierement au mouvement nationaliste hindou : l'« Hindutva » qui soutient que l'Inde est un pays hindou. Ceux-ci, a ce titre, manifestent une grande hostilite a l...