Alternative notions of sexuality and personhood: the case of Bal Gandharva

This article examines the meteoric rise and enormous popularity of a Marathi stage actor and singer, Bal Gandharva, in early twentieth-century western India. Gandharva was distinctive because he was a male artist who dressed and acted as a woman on stage and was adulated by both women and men for his powerful female roles. The article argues that Gandharva embodied ‘fuzzy’ boundaries between man and woman, drawing from indigenous traditions of gender fluidity. While maintaining strict boundaries between being a man in his personal life and a woman on stage, Gandharva tapped into alternative notions of masculinity. I argue that the adulation he experienced for his acting and singing as a woman points to transgressive possibilities in the otherwise conservative middle-class imagination and challenges what are colonial constructions of hyper-masculinity.     

History of a renegade revolutionary: revolutionism and betrayal in colonial India

This paper highlights an understudied aspect of the history of anti-colonial resistance – the role of people who sat on the fence, displayed ambivalence, or at times played an active role in wrecking, damaging and sabotaging resistance against the state. Such people appear, if at all, in popular parlance as ‘traitors’ and in academia as ‘collaborators’, labels which carry a categorical moral bias. By examining nationalism through the lens of betrayal, this paper engages with a methodological question – is there a way of broadening the scope of the history of anti-colonial nationalism which incorporates acts of collaboration (e.g. spying, informing, perfidy, denunciation), without the implicit moral judgment embodied in each term? To tackle this question, this paper reconstructs the history of one renegade revolutionary, Hans Raj Vohra (1909–1985), a government witness who testified against his comrades, the revolutionaries of the Hindustan Socialist Republican Army in the Lahore Conspiracy Case trial (1929–30). This paper contextualizes Hans Raj Vohra's decision to become an ‘approver’, or a government witness, demonstrating the difficulties in framing his perfidy as a form of collaboration.     

Rockfort Temple at Tiruchirapalli,India: Conservation of a Sacred Landscape

Sacred sites in India are subject to many development pressures. Unlike heritage monuments, cultural and historic landscapes have not been the focus of institutional protection and preservation efforts. Using Rockfort Temple complex at Tiruchirapalli, Tamil Nadu, as a case study, we propose that an integrated conservation approach be based upon restoring the natural and spatial archetypes that constitute the landscape vocabulary. A group of excavated and structural temples are located on a hill on the banks of the river Kaveri surrounded by a medieval fort that became the nucleus of urban growth over time. Overwhelming growth of commerce within the last half century has resulted in many problems such as traffic congestion, confusing circulation, and visual chaos, which in turn have led to the loss of sanctity. The structure of the pilgrim landscape constituted by circumambulatory paths, tanks and groves, shrines and temples can be clarified and made legible by minor design interventions such as restoring historic buildings, reviving the holy tanks, planting sacred trees, and building rest pavilions along the pilgrim path.     

Politics of presence: women’s safety and respectability at night in Mumbai,India

This article focuses on women’s mobility in urban public space in Mumbai, India while working night shifts in outsourced call centres. The outsourced call centre industry is heralded as the beacon of modernity, and its entry was facilitated under a neoliberal political economy. This industry disproportionately employs women relative to India’s broader Information Technology sector, resulting in high numbers of women commuting at night. The state has reworked safety-centred policies for women working night shifts in call centres, which have been differentially implemented by companies. Expanding on this variegation, I sketch out the nightscape of transportation and mobility around outsourced call centres. This article analyses how women conceive of safety, as well as its interplay with convenience and considerations of respectability while making decisions about navigating urban public space at night. Women working in call centres find themselves in the crosshairs of narratives that demonize them as ‘bad women’ for being out on the street at night, while working in industries that specifically seek women willing to work in night shifts. Their navigation of this paradox exposes contradictions within the neoliberal modernization of Mumbai and the meaning of public safety for women who make this modernization possible through their labour.     

HISTORY: A HANDMAID'S TALE

Historians are generally coy and diffident when it comes to engaging with the moral question despite it being a critical aspect of doing history. However, historians of empire cannot evade the moral question given the ethical dilemmas that imperialism posed for the men at its helm. To portray the colonists as hypocrites is too facile and cynical an explanation. So, what allowed the British colonists to manage the conscience that they indeed possessed? As Priya Satia boldly argues in Time's Monster: How History Makes History, the answer to this question resides in historicism, which became the new ethical idiom from the nineteenth century onward. It enabled the British colonists to assuage their conscience and made the empire an ethically thinkable reality. It helped whitewash colonial violence and generate public acceptance for colonization. The historians’ power lay in anointing history as providence and in using it to paper over the cracks in the British conscience. Being able to narrate was itself a manifestation of power. It was only after the Second World War that history renounced its pact with power and a reimagination of the historical idiom emerged. Various shades of South Asian and Caribbean anti-colonial leaders and postcolonial writers began to think beyond the historicist category of the empire. These efforts to dismantle the empire's historical narratives were paralleled by the writings of British historian E. P. Thompson, although he remained tied to the idea of history as progress. The moral question, however, remains unsettled. It endures for present-day historians because the teleserials, nostalgic period dramas, and “great men” histories continue to hold sway over the public mind, generate debates about the “benefits” of the empire, and feed Britain's anti-immigrant sentiments. Satia's book lies at the intersection of three sets of historiographies—histories of British political thought, postcolonial writings that highlight alternate conceptions of the past and the significance of orality, memory, and community history, and, lastly, histories of violence—all of which engage the moral question in some form or another.