1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910779333903321

Autore

Lal Ruby

Titolo

Coming of age in nineteenth-century India : the girl-child and the art of playfulness / / Ruby Lal [[electronic resource]]

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Cambridge : , : Cambridge University Press, , 2013

ISBN

1-107-23749-1

1-139-85437-2

1-139-84614-0

1-139-84293-5

1-139-84056-8

1-139-84529-2

1-139-34331-9

1-283-83635-1

1-139-84174-2

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (xvii, 229 pages) : digital, PDF file(s)

Classificazione

HIS017000

Disciplina

305.235/2095409034

Soggetti

Women - India - Social life and customs - 19th century

Girls - India - Social life and customs - 19th century

Domestic relations - India - History - 19th century

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 05 Oct 2015).

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Prelude: opening the door -- 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 -- A retrospect: in pursuit of playfulness.

Sommario/riassunto

In this engaging and eloquent history, Ruby Lal traces the becoming 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 remained agential figures, their activities came to be constrained by more firmly entrenched domestic norms. Lal skillfully marks the subtle and complex alterations in the multifaceted female subject in a variety of nineteenth-century discourses, elaborated in four different sites - forest, school, household, and rooftops.