Speaker: Charu Gupta, Professor of Modern India in the Department of History, University of Delhi
Moderator: Robert P. Goldman, Professor of the Graduate School and Catherine and William L. Magistretti Distinguished Professor of Sanskrit Emeritus
Sponsors: Institute for South Asia Studies, Department of Gender and Women's Studies, Catherine and William L. Magistretti Distinguished Chair of Sanskrit Studies
A talk by Charu Gupta, Professor of Modern India in the Department of History, University of Delhi
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Abstract
This talk will juxtapose disjunctive invocations of Hindu male prowess and constructions of ‘licentious’ and sexually ‘ferocious’ Muslim male on the one hand, and assertions of recalcitrant romances and ‘illicit’ intimacies on the other, in modern India. Taking as its cue manufactured campaigns by hegemonic-homogenized Hindu identities and patriarchies around ‘abductions’ and conversions of Hindu women by Muslim men in early twentieth
century colonial north India and in present-day India under the supposed threat of ‘love jihad’, the talk will probe intersections between masculinities, sexualities, religious identities, intimate lives and political articulations.
The talk will reflect on how the arc of Hindu female desire for men outside the community, even while reifying heteronormativity, means that such desire is visceral and tactile, though it can only be acknowledged when it is being regulated as transgression, producing moral panics and everyday violence along the alliance model of sexuality, where through the arrangement of marriages, relations and boundaries of religion are legislated and policed.
Speaker Bio
Charu Gupta is Professor in Department of History, University of Delhi. She did her PhD from SOAS, University of London. She has been a Visiting Professor and ICCR Chair at the University of Vienna, a Visiting Faculty at the Yale University, the Washington University and the University of Hawaii. She has also been a Fellow at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, Delhi, the Social Science Research Council, New York, the Asian Scholarship Foundation, Thailand, the Wellcome Institute, London, and the University of Oxford. The focus of her work is gender, sexuality, masculinity, caste, religious identities and vernacular literatures in early twentieth century north India. Her publications include the following books: Sexuality, Obscenity, Community: Women, Muslims and the Hindu Public in Colonial India (Permanent Black, 2001 & Palgrave, 2002) (paperbacks 2005, 2008, 2012; kindle e-book 2013); The Gender of Caste: Representing Dalits in Print (Permanent Black & University of Washington Press, 2016; paperback 2017) and Contested Coastlines: Fisherfolk, Nations and Borders in South Asia (Routledge, 2008, 2018). She has edited various books, including Gendering Colonial India: Reforms, Print, Caste and Communalism (Orient Blackswan, 2012) and Caste and Life Narratives (Primus, 2019, co-ed. S. Shankar). She has also been the guest co-editor of special issues of the journals South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly and Cultural Dynamics. Her writings have been translated into Bengali, Marathi and German. She has published several research papers in national-international journals on themes of gender, caste and religious identities. She serves on the editorial board of South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Gender and History and Journal of Women’s History. She is presently working on life narratives in Hindi in early twentieth century north India.
25 апр 2022
