The bilingual relationship between the English and the Indian vernaculars has long been crucial to the construction of ideology as well as cultural and political hierarchies. Print was vital for colonial literacy; it was thereby instrumental in initiating a shift in the relation between 'high' and 'low' languages. Here, Dr Naregal examines the relationship between linguistic hierarchies, textual practices and power in colonial western India. Whereas most studies of colonialism focus on India's 'high' literary culture, this book looks at how local intellectuals exploited their 'middling' position through such initiatives as the establishment of newspapers and of influential channels of communication. How were the 'native' intelligentsia able to achieve a position of ideological influence? Dr Naregal shows that, despite their minority position, such people negotiated the arenas of education policy, the press and voluntary associations to advance their social class. In doing this, she sheds light on the process of self-definition among the Indian intelligentsia before anticolonial thinking articulated its hegemonic claims as a nationalistic discourse.

The topic of sexuality and gender within the South Asian context is timely and widely discussed across a variety of academic disciplines. Since the end of the last century, there have been debates in the cultural sphere in India on issues concerning Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender people’s rights, gender, sex workers’ rights and caste. There has also been an explicit visibility for sexuality in the form of discussion around intimate scenes in films, advertisements and moral concerns around pre-marital heterosexual relationships and same-sex relationships. This book brings out the modalities through which explicit visibility of sexuality gets constituted in the public space of India after the 1990s. The specificities through which relations of gender/ sexuality and caste get constituted and performed in regional media provide significant entry points to an understanding of larger structures and the ever-present fissures through which these larger structures emerge. Focussing on the southern state of Kerala, the book investigates women’s sexuality and caste through a number of case studies: the Suryanelli rape case, neology in the media and the debates around the life narratives of Nalini Jameela, a sex worker. The book does not stop at representational practices as it also looks at the negotiations between the subject and her represented figures which is a significant addition to the existing body of work in the field of media and gender studies. Sexuality and Public Space in India is a careful interrogation of the mass-mediatized space of contemporary public discourse around sexuality. It will be of interest to academics in South Asian Studies, Sociology, Anthropology and Gender Studies.

On 1 May 1960, Bombay Province was bifurcated into the two new provinces of Gujarat and Maharashtra, amidst scenes of great public fanfare and acclaim. This decision marked the culmination of a lengthy campaign for the creation of Samyukta (‘united’) Maharashtra in western India, which had first been raised by some Marathi speakers during the interwar years, and then persistently demanded by Marathi-speaking politicians ever since the mid-1940s. In the context of an impending independence, some of its proponents had envisaged Maharashtra as an autonomous domain encompassing a community of Marathi speakers, which would be constructed around exclusivist notions of belonging and majoritarian democratic frames. As a result, linguistic reorganisation was also quickly considered to be a threat, posing questions for others about the extent to which they belonged to this imagined space. This book delivers ground-breaking perspectives upon nascent conceptions and workings of citizenship and democracy during the colonial/postcolonial transition. It examines how processes of democratisation and provincialisation during the interwar years contributed to demands and concerns and offers a broadened and imaginative outlook on India’s partition. Drawing upon a novel body of archival research, the book ultimately suggests Pakistan might also be considered as just one paradigmatic example of a range of coterminous calls for regional autonomy and statehood, informed by a majoritarian democratic logic that had an extensive contemporary circulation. It will be of interest to academics in the fields of South Asian history in general and the Partition in particular as well as to those interested in British colonialism and postcolonial studies.

"Islam in the Public Sphere explores the contestation of the public sphere by different Islamic groups and traditions in colonial India. It traces the genesis of madrasa-based movements and Islamic groups in South Asia and helps understand the roots of the current state of Islamic activism and militancy in the region." "This book will be an interesting read for historians, political scientists, and journalists as well as scholars and students interested in religious studies and the history of Islam and Islamic groups, with respect to nationalist politics in South Asia."--BOOK JACKET.

This book reopens the debate on the relationship between pring culture, public sphere, and colonial rule. This work, as part of the SOAS series, is the first of its kind on modern Goan cultural politics. It offers an analysis of several categories of print material including pamplets, newsprint, novels, and commentaries among others. Drawing succinctly from available studies that tell the story of pring, reading publics, and linguistic hierarchies elsewhere in colonial India, this work constructs a persuasive account of the possibilites opened up via print and the manner in which it attempted to reorder social, cultural or political ties within Goan society. The author brings in a range of texts to bear on the analysis and goes beyond dominatnt paradigms that seek to fit cultural production by Goans either into accounts of Portuguese imperialism or Indian nationalism. This book discusses print production and politics in nineteenth and early twentieth century Goa. It points to the comparative paucity of academic studies of this period, and suggests why it is necessary to address political and cultural developments of the time. Through a reading of newspapers, pamphlets, novels, and other print ephemera generated by other groups of Goans, it also indicates how this vision was contested in the nineteenth century itself.