If early reformers had argued that women were the weaker sex, Mahatma Gandhi emphasized their nobility and self-sacrifice, and his cotton-spinning program was influenced by women. His appeal to elite class women to purify the nation and to aid their disadvantaged sisters was answered by donations of jewelry, the wearing of homespun cloth (khadi ), […]
Read More »The primary goals of most women’s associations were to improve women’s literacy and health by abolishing child marriage, enforced widowhood, and purdah. Imitating Ramabai’s Arya Mahila Samaj, elite women formed similar sectarian and local organizations. In 1886, Swarnakumari Debi (1856–1932), Rabindranath Tagore’s sister, started Sakhi Samiti (Women’s Friendship League)to spread knowledge among women and widows. In […]
Read More »The platform of women’s rights was central to the nineteenth-century social reform movement, which crystallized both nationalist aspirations and feminist responses to patriarchy. In the twentieth-century nationalist upsurge, Indian women mobilized against colonial rule. When independence was granted in 1947, they achieved important rights. Colonial Constructions of Gender Women’s rights were first advocated in India […]
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The region between the Hindu Kush Mountains and the river Amu Darya (Oxus) is called Bactria. Its old capital, Bactra, was located near the present city of Mazar-e-Sharif in northern Afghanistan. Another important center of this area is Balkh, a town 15.5 miles (25 km) to the west of Mazar-e-Sharif. The Mughal prince Aurangzeb ended […]
Read More »BABUR (1483–1530), founding emperor of the Mughal dynasty in India. A Chaghtai Turk, Zahir-ud- Din Muhammad, known as Babur (“the Tiger”), was a fearless soldier, adventurer, poet, and diarist. His Tuzu-i- Babri (Memoirs of Babur), written in Turki, the diary he kept throughout his life, is one of the great works of historical literature. Babur’s […]
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Born in Tamil Nadu in 1931 to a poor working-class Muslim family, Dr. Avul Pakir Jainulabdeen Abdul Kalam became India’s eleventh president in 2002, the third Muslim to serve as the head of India’s republic. A distinguished prominent scientist and administrator, Abdul Kalam had no political experience prior to his election as president. His unpretentious, […]
Read More »CHILDREN The child is, in many ways, the paradigmatic ‘other’: ‘the child’, its attributes and identity, is something that adults and anthropologists have constructed in dialectical relationship to their own senses of world and self. Perhaps for this reason, anthropological work on children and childhood has been extremely diverse and long-lived without being particularly coherent […]
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It is perhaps ironical that at the same time as there has been an anthropological desire to deconstruct the central place given in the West to vision as a form of knowing (where ‘I see’ is synonymous with (‘I understand’) (cf. Ong 1969; Dias 1994), and to recognize an array of other senses and forms […]
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Somnath was famous then, as a great Shiva shrine described in detail in the Skanda Purana of the 9th century A.D. and also mentioned by Al-Beruni both as a sacred place and a resort of pirates. The expedition of Somnath was the crowning event in the idol – breaking and plundering career of Mahmud of […]
Read More »Acchuvaru are Recorded, in the Madras Census Report, as ” Oriya-speaking carriers of grain, etc., on pack bullocks. Treated as a sub-division of Gaudo.” The Acchuvarus are not Oriya people, but are attached to the Devanga weavers, and receive their name from the fact that they do acchupani, i.e., thread the long comb-like structures of […]
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