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Gosain Tawaif: slaves, sex and ascetics in Rasdhan, ca. 1800-1857

Article Abstract:

The prominent role of ascetic armies in the military and political affairs of northern India is reviewed and attention is given to the position of women and children in one such army, the descendants of Rajendragiri Gosain of Bundelkhand. There were significant numbers of women in gosain settlement in Rasdhan, some of who were highly influential and were described in official correspondence as 'concubines', 'prostitutes' and 'slaves', which meant tawaif, randi and bandi respectively.

Women in public life

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In search of the British Indian in British India: white orphans, Kipling's Kim, and class in colonial India

Article Abstract:

Kim is read as a working-class protagonist created by a middle-class author writing out of a back to the highly stratified and hyper-masculinized colonial cultures of India and England at the turn of the last century. The importance of scholarship about class that is committed to the unearthing of working-class histories and writings and of the middle-class discourses that buried them.

Indian history, British colonialism

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Imagining 'Greater India': French and Indian visions of colonialism in the Indic mode

Article Abstract:

The different ways in which a particular group of Indian thinkers built on the writings of twentieth-century Indologists, anthropologists, archaeologists and art historians are explored. The results indicate that there are three distinct levels at which one may understand the imagining of nationhood both within and beyond the contexts of formal colonial rule in south Asia.

Comparative analysis, Colonialism

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