“REGULAR VISITS TO PURDAH BAAG”: CREATING THE MODERN FEMALE BODY: IN EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY INDIA

 

Devleena Ghosh, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of Technology Sydney

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Paper Abstract:

Universal concepts such as education, female emancipation, political rights circulate and accrue particular meanings in different contexts. It is important, therefore, to upset the idea of an origin story of the rights-bearing body that, by virtue of its modularity, renders later adoptions derivative. Rather, as Ajantha Subramanian says, this spatiotemporal hierarchy of origin and destination, whether it be Britain, Australia or India, should be seen in continuity with previous histories of biopolitical claim making. To understand these politics, then, it is necessary to attend to both regional histories of claim making and transnational histories of circulation.

The early twentieth century was a period when the young female body was re-worked and re-conceptualised in colonial India. These identities and physiques became the bearers of stereotypes, inscribed with piety, domesticity and honour, to be re-cast, re-made, re-invented. This presentation tells the story of an Australian theosophist who became the principal of the first girls’ school in Delhi and who used the tenets of theosophy and the international focus on female education to remake both the bodies and the minds of her Indian students. Leonora Gmeiner’s commitment to improving the lives of Indian women, through both physical and intellectual education, is an example of an “internationalist moment” in the context of anti-colonial modernity that transcended local and national political, social and cultural networks and boundaries.

Biography:

Devleena Ghosh teaches in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Technology Sydney. She has published widely in the fields of postcolonial, environmental and gender studies. One of her current projects examines the intercolonial relationships of women in the Indian Ocean region during the Cold War and another (funded by the Research Council of Norway) analyses syncretic religious practices existing in various communities praying at a Catholic Church in India.

 

Devleena Ghosh’s lecture can be found here 
 

Devleena's website: https://www.uts.edu.au/staff/devleena.ghosh (further information - research Interests, publications, teaching areas)