Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
- Keyword
Articles 1 - 7 of 7
Full-Text Articles in Entire DC Network
The Gender Of Madrasa Teaching, Nita Kumar
The Gender Of Madrasa Teaching, Nita Kumar
CMC Faculty Publications and Research
There are thousands of Muslim children, both girls and boys, going to madrasas in all the cities of South Asia (Sikand 2005: pp 313-14). Zeenat and Shahzad, a weaver’s daughter and a weaver’s son in the city of Varanasi, North India, the centre of silk weaving, are two such children. All adult Muslims, such as all the adult male and female members of Zeenat and Shahzad’s families, explicitly articulate and perform gender identities. Can we make a useful co-relation between the gender identities of the adults and the experience of the madrasa?
Mothers And Non-Mothers: Gendering The Discourse Of Education In South Asia, Nita Kumar
Mothers And Non-Mothers: Gendering The Discourse Of Education In South Asia, Nita Kumar
CMC Faculty Publications and Research
This essay brings together and complicates three stories within South Asian education history by gendering them. Thus modern education was actively pursued by mothers for their sons; indigenous education should be understood as continuing at home; and women were crucial actors in men's reform and nationalism efforts through both collaboration and resistance. Gendered history should go beyond the separate story of girls and women, or the understanding of women as mothers and mothers as the nation, to see these three processes as gendered. The essay argues for the coming together of historical and anthropological arguments and for using literature imaginatively.
The Scholar And Her Servants: Further Thoughts On Postcolonialism And Education, Nita Kumar
The Scholar And Her Servants: Further Thoughts On Postcolonialism And Education, Nita Kumar
CMC Faculty Publications and Research
The hypothesis of the paper is twofold. By juxtaposing the two subject-positions of mistress and servant, moving between one and the other to highlight how each is largely constructed by the interaction, we illuminate the questions of margin and centre, silence and voice, and can ponder on how to do anthropology better. But secondly, to the work of several scholars who propose various approaches to these questions, I add the particular insight offered by the perspective of education. Because one of the subject-positions is that of ‘the scholar’, someone professionally engaged in knowledge production, the new question I want to …
The (No) Work And (No) Leisure World Of Women In Assi, Banaras, Nita Kumar
The (No) Work And (No) Leisure World Of Women In Assi, Banaras, Nita Kumar
CMC Faculty Publications and Research
In the riverside neighborhood (mohalla) of Assi, in the south of Banaras, families of the following professions are to be found: the preparation and retail of foods such as: milk, sweets, tea, paan, peanuts and snacks; clerical work in offices or shops; private professional work, such as priesthood, teaching, boating, cleaning toilets; and crafts, such as masonry, weaving, making and maintaining jacquard machines, carpentry, and goldsmithy. All this work is done by men in the public sphere. In Banaras, the observable and articulated sphere of activity called "work" (kam) largely exists for men only. Men are …
A Postcolonial School In A Modern World, Nita Kumar, Som Majumdar
A Postcolonial School In A Modern World, Nita Kumar, Som Majumdar
CMC Faculty Publications and Research
This essay is about a school, taken not only as an educational project, but as an active historical intervention. A discussion of the school helps us to interpret the history of education, and perhaps all history, with new insight; to understand the nature of modernity in a provincial city; and to fashion an approach to both theory and practice that could be called postcolonial.
History At The Madrasas, Nita Kumar
History At The Madrasas, Nita Kumar
CMC Faculty Publications and Research
Madrasas: In the archival records of the British colonial state, as well as in the private records of members of the Indian intelligentsia, the indigenous school of North India is referred to by the generic term 'madrasa'. There is no exclusive implication of this institution as Islamic. This is close to the literal meaning of 'madrasa' which is 'the place of dars': dars being teaching, instruction, a lesson, or lecture.
Widows, Education And Social Change In Twentieth Century Banaras, Nita Kumar
Widows, Education And Social Change In Twentieth Century Banaras, Nita Kumar
CMC Faculty Publications and Research
In the first half of this century, some one dozen women in Banaras played key rotes in channelling the educational movement into new directions, expanding its agenda to include girls, especially poor girls. These women stand out as pioneering in that they founded schools, dynamic in the way they administered and expanded them, and radical in the vision they had for their students. What makes the case of these women particularly interesting is that they were mostly widows. They rejected the familiar stereotypes for widows through their activism, but in subtle ways that retained for them the respect of society …