History Commons^™

The Migration Of South Asians From India To Guyana: The Journey, Struggles In A New Land, Reasons For Changes Over Time And Their Cultivation Of A New Culture., Cynthia C. Harry

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Indians from different regions of India arrived in Guyana through indentureship in 1838. They were under a five-year contract and had to work on the sugar plantations for the duration of their indentureship. While they tried to persist their Indian culture, assimilation in their new environments and interaction with people of different cultures, allowed them to develop a culture unique to Indo Guyanese heritage.

This thesis focuses on the history of Indian diaspora in Guyana. It evokes the struggles they faced on the ships, and during and after indentureship. It also touches on the political and racial issues they had …

The "Indian" Alexander: Reworking Nationalism, Myth, And Sikandar, John Sexton

Madison Historical Review

This article seeks to expand scholarly inquiry regarding the Alexander Romance into twentieth century India and away the Near East of Antiquity and the Europe of the Middle Ages where it is usually confined. In particular this article will discuss the Alexander Romance’s impact upon and connection with the modern invention of the cinema. Besides the usual cinematic culprit of analysis, Oliver Stone's Alexander (2004), there is another less-discussed cinematic work regarding Alexander the Great. That being Sohrab Modi's Hindustani historical epic Sikandar (1941) from British colonial India. Regarding the Macedonian conqueror and his reputation among Indian scholars such as …

Against Conflict, Against Occupation: Protest Songs In India And Kashmir, Mridula Sharma

Comparative Woman

The establishment of All India Progressive Writers’ Association in colonial India encouraged artists to articulate and examine social realities. Literary-cultural productions, particularly popular songs in Hindi films, in independent India continued to remain preoccupied with social conflicts such as religious bigotry and communalism. Sahir Ludhianvi’s “Yeh Duniya Agar Mil Bhi Jaye” (trans. “What can one gain, even if one gains this world?,” 1958 ) and “Yeh Kiska Lahu Hai, Kaun Mara” (trans. “Whose Blood Has Spilled? Who Died?,” 1961) are early examples of a lasting tide of pessimism owing to communal violence during the 1947 India-Pakistan …

Immigration, Diversity, Cultural Clash, And – Hopefully – Cultural Melding? A Review Of Mrs. Chatterjee Vs. Norway (2023), Raja Ramanathan

Markets, Globalization & Development Review

For migrating from 'developing’ countries, to relocate in the ‘advanced West’, a message that came through from the western society is clear: “Integrate.” The Norwegian official in the movie 'Mrs. Chatterjee vs. Norway" says this unequivocally and with impact: “Be like us if you want to live here or go back to where you came from.” The message of the western world – ever since they started colonizing the ‘native’ lands of Asia, Asia and the Americas – was that the natives had to be saved from themselves. That was “the white man’s burden” – a burden of “civilizing” the …

The Theology Of The Liturgical Seasons In The Syro-Malabar Church, Ann Mary Madavanakadu Cmc

Journal of Global Catholicism

This paper focuses on the theology of the liturgical seasons in the Syro-Malabar Church. The liturgical year with its liturgical cycles and seasons, is more than just a mere structural framework for the prayer life of the Church. It is a true locus of rich theology. The liturgical year is defined as the yearly plan of spiritual life by the Church, for her children, arranged in different seasons or periods to celebrate the mysteries of Christ in life together with feasts, fasts, and abstinence in order to make Christian life a successful pilgrimage to heaven for attaining salvation. This article …

Palliyogam: A Vibrant Legacy Of The Syro-Malabar Archiepiscopal Church, Dery Davis

Journal of Global Catholicism

This article explores the historic inheritance of the Palliyogam of the sui iuris Syro-Malabar Major Archiepiscopal Church, focusing on its role in maintaining synodality in ecclesial life. Palliyogam, a parish assembly, has been the cornerstone of ecclesial communion among Malabar Christians for centuries. As Pope Francis inaugurates the three-year synod on synodality, this study examines how Palliyogam aligns with this synodal vision. The article delves into both the ancient form of Palliyogam and its present-day manifestation, shedding light on their theology and role in governance and decision-making within the Syro-Malabar tradition. The article emphasizes that synodality is already inherent …

Editor's Introduction, Mathew Schmalz

Journal of Global Catholicism

Introduction by Founding Editor, Mathew N. Schmalz to Graduate Symposium II.

Burdin, Johannah, Samantha Rouillard

Querying the Past: LGBTQ Maine Oral History Project Collection

Johannah Burdin shares her story as a lesbian/queer woman experiencing southern Maine in the 1990s. Her story touches on topics involving coming out, relationships, a traumatic incident that left her disabled, activism, and much more. She was active in her youth in spreading awareness on the AIDS/HIV crisis, education on safe sex, and spent her evenings at popular Portland gay bars, like Sister’s Bar and Limelight/The Underground. Although she is not much into drinking, she recognized these were some of the few spots queer people could go to make community and relationships. Johannah also shares her story of becoming a …

Theological Implications Of The Symbols And Signs In The Sacrament Of Matrimony Of The Syro-Malabar Church, Nelson Mathew O. Carm.

Journal of Global Catholicism

This article discusses the significance of the signs and symbols used in the sacrament of the marriage of the Syro-Malabar Church and the adaptations from different cultures, particularly the Hindu culture of India. It concentrates on the specific elements found in the marriage celebration of the St. Thomas Christians. The rituals that are unique to the Sacrament of Matrimony of the Syro-Malabar Church, mainly expressed through symbols and signs, remain a significant contribution to the liturgy, spirituality, and theology of the Sacrament of Matrimony, and to the theology of inculturation. In the Syro-Malabar liturgy, marriage rituals, and signs and symbols …

Overview & Acknowledgments, Marc R. Loustau Ph.D.

Journal of Global Catholicism

An introduction to the current issue of the Journal of Global Catholicism.

The “Evil” Of Railway Gauge Breaks: A Study Of Causes In Britain, India, Japan, And Manchuria, Miles Herman

History Honors Theses

A railroad gauge is defined as the width between two rails on a track. In the earliest days of railroading, many companies adopted different gauges, often resulting in chaos where incompatible lines met up. By the 20^thcentury, most countries selected a single national gauge, but the fallout from the ‘battle of the gauges’ can still be felt today, making the issue of gauge breaks more than an historical footnote. This thesis suggests that the study of track width can provide meaningful insight into why Britain and Japan differed so greatly in constructing their own railroad lines—differences that impacted …

Your Country Needs You (And Also Your Resources) Britain And Her Colonies During And Shortly After Ww2, Anthony-Noel Cepe

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

No conflict has shaped the modern world more thoroughly than the Second World War. However, the retelling of this era, whether through mass media or more scholarly works such as books and journal articles, is one seen through a white, Eurocentric lens. This is strange; as the name implies, the Second World War was a truly global conflict, involving not only the major world powers at the time, but also their subjects. Great Britain was no exception; far from the popular image of it standing alone in the face of Nazi tyranny, the island nation drew vast amounts of men …

A Legacy Of Homophobia: Effects Of British Colonization On Queer Rights In India And Uganda, Kelly Christensen

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

Globally, there are 69 countries where homosexuality is still illegal, of these 69, 36 countries are current or former British Colonies, creating a statical connection between the era of British Colonization and homophobic practices. This paper researches how moral regulations were used during the act of colonization to control and separate populations, using India and Uganda as case studies.

Women Of The Dalit Unrest: Rewriting Bodies, Reinforcing Resistance, Suddhadeep Mukherjee

Tête à Tête: Journal of Francophone Studies

The paper aims to take the scholarship on corporeal feminism and Dalit Studies forward by focusing on the Dalit woman’s body. The body is not treated as an inert surface in this paper but is considered as a transformative medium that can alter its embedded codifications and significations through transgressive performances in the face of systemic and systematized caste violence. In doing so the gendered body not only challenges to rewrite the Dalit epistemology from the vantage of resistance but also initiates a rethinking of Indian feminism. The paper begins with a discursive discussion on the importance of the gender …

The Peacock Dress: The Language Of British Imperialism In India, 1899-1905, Rebecca Onken

Copley Library Undergraduate Research Awards

Imperialism exists in tandem with colonialism. Empires seek out colonies for their resources so they can take the wealth in those countries for their own. Rarely do empires admit this, so they require a language with which to reframe their practices. The British Raj in India exemplifies this. A narrative of exploitation is at first hard to discern, because while the British drained India of its resources and broke down its industries, they appreciated Indian art and objects too, to the point of clothing themselves in Indian textiles, as in the case of the titular Peacock dress. But this appreciation …

‘It All Comes From Me’: Bahu Begam And The Making Of The Awadh Nawabi, Circa 1765–1815, Nicholas J. Abbott

History Faculty Publications

This article examines the durable, yet largely overlooked, claims of Bahu Begam (1727–1815) to dynastic wealth and authority in the Awadh nawabi (1722–1856), a North Indian Mughal ‘successor state’ and an important client of the East India Company. Chief consort (khass mahal) to Nawab Shuja-ud-Daula (r. 1754–75) and mother to his successor Nawab Asaf-ud-Daula (r. 1775–97), Bahu Begam played a well-documented role in the regime’s tumultuous politics, particularly during Warren Hastings’s tenure as the Company’s governor-general (1773–85) and his later parliamentary impeachment. But despite her prominent political influence, little attention has been paid to the substance of her …

Colonial Contraception: American Birth Control Advocates And Their Work In Appalachia, Puerto Rico, And India; 1930-1970, Dana Johnson

Theses and Dissertations--History

By the beginning of the twentieth century, the development of better contraceptives and changing cultural attitudes led to an increased interest in contraceptive research. Although major political, legal, social, religious, and cultural obstacles remained, birth control advocates began to perform clinical trials to identify effective contraceptives and to disseminate contraceptive information. These trials began in the United States, but birth control advocates quickly introduced them into other areas. In this dissertation, I examine the research efforts of the American birth control movement through an analysis of the activities and discourse of its key advocates and promoters during the middle decades …

The Indian Mission Of The Institute Of Blessed Virgin Mary (Ibvm) Nuns: Convents, Curriculum, And Indian Women, Nilanjana Paul

History Faculty Publications and Presentations

This study focuses on the Indian mission of IBVM nuns, and the role played by them in the spread of female education in India. While acknowledging that missionaries were part of the imperial process, this study analyzes the work of Catholic nuns in India, their convents, and curriculum to show how their work advanced women’s educational opportunities in India. In the process the study examines how Catholic nuns resisted the dominating attitude of the Catholic Church in India. The last section of the article examines how Christian influence under missionaries not only prepared good mothers and wives but also trained …

The Legal Question Of Being An "Anglo-Indian": Race, Identity, And Law In Colonial India, Vishwajeet Deshmukh

Armstrong Undergraduate Journal of History

From colonial times to modern-day independent India, mixed-race groups have struggled to find their existence in a legal context. The East India Company to the British Empire witnessed a change in attitude towards the mixed-race group also known as Eurasians and Anglo-Indians. Through the course of this article, the author reflects how the legal definition of Anglo-Indians was changed and interpreted according to the British when the group posed a threat to the security of the Empire. This changing attitude was reflected through a series of regulations and legislation passed by the British Empire which has classified the group as …

Book Review Of Hungry Nation: Food, Famine, And The Making Of Modern India, Marc A. Reyes

Madison Historical Review

Attached is a book review on Benjamin Robert Siegel's Hungry Nation: Food, Famine, and the Making of Modern India.

The Inner Revolution: Shuddhi And The Reinvention Of Hinduism, Nirav Mehta

Swarthmore Undergraduate History Journal

The Shuddhi movement of the late 19^th century was a religious revolutionary movement that aimed to intrinsically restructure and transform the Hinduism and Hindu society into a more socially equalized and religiously universal system. It was a quest to reconstruct Hindu religious and social identity in response to socioeconomic modernism and challenges from Christian and Islamic proselytization. The first phase of the movement lasted from the 1880s to the late 1910s and was defined by a persistent struggle with orthodox society to transform Hinduism by opening its doors to induct and assimilate returning and new converts. The second phase …

Textures Of The Ordinary: Doing Anthropology After Wittgenstein [Table Of Contents], Veena Das

Philosophy & Theory

Textures of the Ordinary: Doing Anthropology After Wittgenstein is an exploration of everyday life in which anthropology finds a companionship with philosophy. Based on two decades of ethnographic work among low-income urban families in India, Das shows how the notion of texture allows her to align her ethnography with stunning anthropological moments in Wittgenstein and Cavell as well as in literary texts from India. Das poses a compelling question – how might we speak of a human form of life when the very idea of the human has been put into question? The response to this question, Das argues, does …

Social Standards Of Imposition: Respectability And The Raj Through The Eyes Of Governess Marjorie Ussher, Erin A. Nelsen

Antonian Scholars Honors Program

The British Empire possesses a long history of imposing ways of thinking, political structures, economic structures, and social standards on their territories. From 1934 to 1940, during the final years of the Raj (British sovereignty in India), this imperialism extended to standards of beauty and respectability in Hyderabad, the capital of the Hyderabad state. These standards arise in the archived letters British governess Marjorie Ussher wrote to her family during this timeframe. Through a close reading of the letters, this thesis recognizes and reflects on Ussher’s aesthetics depictions of the people, objects, and the natural landscape around her. Within this …

The Permanent Liminality Of Pakistan's Northern Areas- The Case Of Gilgit-Baltistan, Hamna Tariq

Senior Theses and Projects

Since Pakistan’s inception, Gilgit-Baltistan, a sprawling region in Northern Pakistan, has not been granted provincial status due to its colonial association with the disputed region of Kashmir. Gilgit-Baltistan refutes its forceful integration with Kashmir, an unfortunate remnant of British divide-and-rule strategy, and demands provincial recognition and constitutional rights. Pakistan unfairly claims that it awaits the UN-sanctioned plebiscite in Kashmir to determine the region’s status. However, the likelihood of a plebiscite is little to none, since the Indian government officially annexed Indian-held Kashmir in August 2019, breaching the UN resolution on the plebiscite. A region that has been at the mercy …

Historical Geopolitics Of Kashmir: A Discourse Analysis Of Civilizational Framings, Thomas J. Liguori

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation attempts to locate the intractable issue of Kashmir within a global context. The global setting utilized here is constituted and shaped by multiple levels, none of which is purely discrete, and which act upon each other with differing degrees of salience. Taking a discourse analytic approach, political positions can be seen as activating (acting upon, mobilizing, or challenging) existing discursive material in a given political context and then deploying it. This dissertation aims to show how the Kashmir problem has: 1) come about; that is, how it has been constituted and the (discursive) contexts which shaped the available …

India’S Military And Its Impact On The Formation Of A Nation, Nikki Sway

History - Master of Arts in Teaching

I. Synthesis Essay……………………………….2

II. Primary Documents and Headnotes………..25

III. Textbook Critique……………………………..35

IV. New Textbook Entry………………………….39

V. Bibliography…………………………………....50

Trickle Down Nationalism: Interactions Between Liberal Nationalism And Colonialism In The Raj And Nigeria, Aaryaman Sheoran

CMC Senior Theses

The combination of nationalism and colonialism has remained understudied in academia, despite the important interaction between the two phenomena. European ideas bled over into their colonial empires and began to fill the power vacuum created by colonial enterprises. This study analyzes the impact of British colonialism on the development of national identity in British India and Nigeria.

British influences included large scale economic disruption, cultural reform through ‘westernizing’ the population and abolishing local customs, and creating a new set of institutions to replace traditional power centers. Inevitably, these factors created a nationalist surge across both the Raj and Nigeria, as …

A People So Different From Themselves: British Attitudes Towards India And The Power Dynamics Of The East India Company, Eric Gray

Steeplechase: An ORCA Student Journal

Today, many characteristics of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century British Raj are well ingrained in the public consciousness, particularly Victorian Era Britons’ general disdain for numerous aspects of the many cultures found on the Indian Subcontinent. Moreover, while many characteristics of the preceding East India Company’s rule in India were no less exploitative of Indian peoples, evidence shows a much different relationship between British and Indian cultures during the East India Company’s hegemony over India than those of the later Raj. Prior to the nineteenth century, many Britons, both those who traveled to India and those who did not, appeared to …

Alfred Russel Wallace Notes 9: The South Asian Connection, Charles H. Smith, Sahotra Sarkar, Nirmali Wijegoonawardana

Faculty/Staff Personal Papers

Alfred Russel Wallace (1823−1913) is best known for his natural history explorations and theoretical biology, but he was also a potent social critic on subjects ranging from land tenure and colonial policy to antivaccinationism and poverty. Here, one of his emphases in the latter domain is spotlighted: his interest in South Asian affairs. This extended to a variety of subjects in the areas of politics, economics, health, literature, sociology, etc., and to a degree that may have had some influence on the development of thought of some major South Asian figures, including Mahatma Gandhi and Ananda K. Coomaraswamy.

Creating Herstory: Female Rebellion In Arundhati Roy’S "The God Of Small Things" And "The Ministry Of Utmost Happiness", Priyanka Tewari

Theses and Dissertations

In The God of Small Things and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness novels, the author Arundhati Roy is not only attempting to give feminist weight to the multiplicity of locations in which gender is articulated by recasting her female characters in their quest for selfhood, she is also focusing on women and women-identified characters as agents of history, thereby contributing to an ongoing project of feminist historiography.