Domesticity in Colonial India

Domesticity in Colonial India offers a trenchant analysis of the impact of imperialism on the personal, familial, and daily structures of colonized people's lives. Exploring the 'intimacies of empire,' Judith E. Walsh traces changing Indian gender relations and the social reconstructions of the late nineteenth century. For urban middle-class Indians of this time, the Hindu woman and her domestic world were at the center of a debate over colonial modernity and indigenous home and family...
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Domesticity in Colonial India offers a trenchant analysis of the impact of imperialism on the personal, familial, and daily structures of colonized people's lives. Exploring the 'intimacies of empire,' Judith E. Walsh traces changing Indian gender relations and the social reconstructions of the late nineteenth century. For urban middle-class Indians of this time, the Hindu woman and her domestic world were at the center of a debate over colonial modernity and indigenous home and family life. The practices of family, home, and daily life that resulted would define the Hindu woman of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and the domestic worlds in which she was embedded. With its rich and compelling use of primary sources, this book will be invaluable not only to scholars and students of South Asian history, but also to a general audience interested in women's history and colonialism. The accompanying website includes a full array of the authorOs translations of never-before-studied Bengali-language domestic manuals.