000 02274cam a2200217 i 4500
001 20979465
010 _a 2019328431
020 _a9789352904044 (hardback)
020 _a9789352904143 (paperback)
082 _a305.23082
_bRUB/I
100 1 _aRuby Lal
245 1 0 _aIn pursuit of playfulness :
_bthe girl-child/woman and nineteenth-century India /
260 _aDelhi
_bPrimus books
_c2019
300 _axvii, 229 p.
_billustrations (black and white), maps (black and white) ;
520 _aIn this engaging and eloquent history, Ruby Lal traces the becoming of nineteenth-century Indian women through a critique of narratives of linear transition from girlhood to womanhood. In the north Indian patriarchal environment, women's lives were dominated by the expectations of the male universal, articulated most clearly in household chores and domestic duties. The author argues that girls and women in the early nineteenth century experienced freedom, eroticism, adventurousness and playfulness, even within restrictive circumstances. Although women in the colonial world of the later nineteenth century remained agential figures, their activities came to be constrained by more firmly entrenched domestic norms. Lal skillfully marks the subtle and complex alterations in the multifaceted female subject in a variety of nineteenth-century discourses, elaborated in four different sites-forest, school, household and rooftops. The Author Ruby Lal is an acclaimed historian of Mughal India. Her first book Domesticity and Power in the Early Mughal World won much acclaim, including numerous reviews in major international magazines, such as The New York Review of Books, The Economic and Political Weekly, Revue Historique, and The Times Literary Supplement. The Western edition of her second book, Coming of Age in Nineteenth-Century India: The Girl Child and the Art of Playfulness was reviewed extensively in academic journals and magazines with wider intellectual concerns. Her latest work is a creative non-fiction book, Empress: The Astonishing Reign of Nur Jahan (2018). She teaches at Emory University and divides her time between Atlanta and Delhi.
650 0 _aGirls
650 0 _aWomen
650 0 _aWomen
650 0 _aGirls in literature
942 _cBK
999 _c67394
_d67394