Charu Gupta
Charu Gupta is Senior Professor in the Department of History, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Delhi. 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. She is the author of Sexuality, Obscenity, Community: Women, Muslims and the Hindu Public in Colonial India (Permanent Black, Delhi, 2001 & Palgrave, New York, 2002) (paperbacks 2005, 2008, 2012; kindle e-book 2013), and The Gender of Caste: Representing Dalits in Print (Permanent Black, India & University of Washington Press, 2016; paperback 2017). She is also the editor of Gendering Colonial India: Reforms, Print, Caste and Communalism (Orient Blackswan, Delhi, 2012). She has published several papers in national-international journals on themes of sexualities, masculinities, caste and religious identities. She is presently working on life narratives in Hindi in early twentieth century north India.
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Books by Charu Gupta
The collection is interdisciplinary, interlinguistic, intercultural, international, and comparative. It represents a range of disciplines, including art criticism, education, film studies, history, law, literary criticism, management studies, and sociology. It covers a diversity of languages, archives, regions, cultural traditions, genres, themes, identities and personae. Drawing from postcolonial, Dalit and Critical Caste Studies, it offers unique theoretical and methodological perspectives, provoking new ways of entering into the burgeoning study of caste.
Charu Gupta shows that the creation by elites of hegemonic print and literary practices involved the operation of caste and gender in tandem. Caste and gender constituted society in vital ways and caste was central to how gender was reproduced. Deriving her material from Uttar Pradesh a century ago, she shows that ideas about gender were critical to caste practices in relation to Dalits.
Historicizing several axes along which Dalits were represented—gender, caste, class, and community, she extends the preoccupations of Indian feminists and Dalit historians. Utilizing the lens of ‘representation’, she examines ideological discourses that constructed Dalits generally, and Dalit women specifically. Such constructions, she argues, suggest the implicit collusion of colonizers, nationalists, reformers, and Dalits themselves. She takes us through historical narratives that helped engender images of Dalits and ‘untouchable’ women, reifications which North Indians internalized and reproduced towards a cultural ‘common sense’ that persists into our own time.
This book questions both the presumptive ‘upper-casteness’ of feminist studies and the presumptive maleness of most Dalit studies of the colonial period. Dalit masculinity, remembrances of 1857, popular vocabularies and idioms, conversion anxieties, and the difficulties of indentured labour are among the many themes of this book—a major expansion of the field.
This volume brings out various regional complexities and lively public debates on social reforms for women and their impact on issues like sati, widow remarriage, domesticity, sexuality and education. It shows how women emerged as both objects and subjects of popular discourse and discussions. Simultaneously, the essays engage with concerns around masculinity, inter-caste intimacies and communal identities.
The debates found multifaceted expression in an emerging dynamic popular-public sphere and also in a flourishing vernacular print culture. These in turn served as powerful tools for propagating dominant ideas about women and for fashioning national, regional and community identities.
The three primary texts translated by J. Devika, Anshu Malhotra and Charu Gupta bring out the relationship, most often fraught, between popular literature, reforms and women.
With contributions from both established and emerging feminist historians, this book will be an indispensible read for students and scholars of modern Indian history, colonialism, nationalism, gender studies and popular culture.
"
These conflicts have been objects of everyday news, but never a subject of serious study. A first of its kind, the present book breaks new ground by examining the journeys of these fisherfolk and coastal conflicts in South Asia from several overlapping but distinct perspectives: declining sea resources, security and border anxieties, suffering of the fisherfolk, their ambiguous identities and transnational movements. In being fisherfolk-centric, the book marginalizes the concerns of the state from the perspective of security, questions its very basis and argues for a shift in its perspective.
This book will interest those in the disciplines of history, sociology, political science, defence security studies and development economics. It will also be of interest to NGOs, fisherfolk organizations, and to those concerned with issues of nationalism, marginalized populations and international borders.
"
Research Papers by Charu Gupta
that delve into complex geographies of communal identities in
modern South Asia. It situates these papers at a significant intersection
of spatial histories and historical geographies of the region,
with a focus on exploring the intricate relationship between community
and religious identity on the one hand, and space and scale
on the other. We take a broad view of communal geographies,
reconsidering spatiality through community histories that encompass
diverse contexts such as local mohallas and national statistics,
rural and urban settings, and secular and religious spaces. It illustrates
how religious communities have mapped their identities
onto everyday arenas like borders, gurdwaras, homes, markets,
mosques, shops, streets and temples. Drawing from various disciplinary
and theoretical perspectives and employing methodologies
ranging from archival research to oral history and ethnography, this
special section expands our understanding of how social practices
and religious interactions leave their footprints on geography.
Yashoda Devi, and a Shudra, Santram B.A. In the context of an
efflorescence of vernacular sexology literature in early twentiethcentury
North India, it explicates how their writings moved along
different registers, whereby they envisaged a heterosexual ethics
that relied on utopian and dystopian descriptions of modernity.
Sexology in Hindi, particularly when construed from the margins,
reified, constructed, destabilised and questioned sexual norms.
The article argues that while largely operating within reformist
sexology frames, their writings at times punctured dominant
upper-caste, male-centric authority and created frictions in normative
equations. Together, their writings contribute significantly to
creating a vernacular archive of sexual sciences in India.
Europe by Swami Satyadev ‘Parivrajak’ (1879–1961), one of the
first persons to systematically write travelogues in Hindi. I argue
that Parivrajak’s travel literature was part of a colonised nation’s
attempt to reclaim a space of freedom, forged through the carving
of ‘perfect masculine bodies’, which embodied his ideals of
beauty and pleasure. It was a performative, political act that
inscribed gendered landscapes with a dialogue between East and
West, slavery and freedom. The Hindu male’s subaltern masculinity
had to be overcome through diverse means, all of which
metaphorically interacted to shape Parivrajak’s writings.
The collection is interdisciplinary, interlinguistic, intercultural, international, and comparative. It represents a range of disciplines, including art criticism, education, film studies, history, law, literary criticism, management studies, and sociology. It covers a diversity of languages, archives, regions, cultural traditions, genres, themes, identities and personae. Drawing from postcolonial, Dalit and Critical Caste Studies, it offers unique theoretical and methodological perspectives, provoking new ways of entering into the burgeoning study of caste.
Charu Gupta shows that the creation by elites of hegemonic print and literary practices involved the operation of caste and gender in tandem. Caste and gender constituted society in vital ways and caste was central to how gender was reproduced. Deriving her material from Uttar Pradesh a century ago, she shows that ideas about gender were critical to caste practices in relation to Dalits.
Historicizing several axes along which Dalits were represented—gender, caste, class, and community, she extends the preoccupations of Indian feminists and Dalit historians. Utilizing the lens of ‘representation’, she examines ideological discourses that constructed Dalits generally, and Dalit women specifically. Such constructions, she argues, suggest the implicit collusion of colonizers, nationalists, reformers, and Dalits themselves. She takes us through historical narratives that helped engender images of Dalits and ‘untouchable’ women, reifications which North Indians internalized and reproduced towards a cultural ‘common sense’ that persists into our own time.
This book questions both the presumptive ‘upper-casteness’ of feminist studies and the presumptive maleness of most Dalit studies of the colonial period. Dalit masculinity, remembrances of 1857, popular vocabularies and idioms, conversion anxieties, and the difficulties of indentured labour are among the many themes of this book—a major expansion of the field.
This volume brings out various regional complexities and lively public debates on social reforms for women and their impact on issues like sati, widow remarriage, domesticity, sexuality and education. It shows how women emerged as both objects and subjects of popular discourse and discussions. Simultaneously, the essays engage with concerns around masculinity, inter-caste intimacies and communal identities.
The debates found multifaceted expression in an emerging dynamic popular-public sphere and also in a flourishing vernacular print culture. These in turn served as powerful tools for propagating dominant ideas about women and for fashioning national, regional and community identities.
The three primary texts translated by J. Devika, Anshu Malhotra and Charu Gupta bring out the relationship, most often fraught, between popular literature, reforms and women.
With contributions from both established and emerging feminist historians, this book will be an indispensible read for students and scholars of modern Indian history, colonialism, nationalism, gender studies and popular culture.
"
These conflicts have been objects of everyday news, but never a subject of serious study. A first of its kind, the present book breaks new ground by examining the journeys of these fisherfolk and coastal conflicts in South Asia from several overlapping but distinct perspectives: declining sea resources, security and border anxieties, suffering of the fisherfolk, their ambiguous identities and transnational movements. In being fisherfolk-centric, the book marginalizes the concerns of the state from the perspective of security, questions its very basis and argues for a shift in its perspective.
This book will interest those in the disciplines of history, sociology, political science, defence security studies and development economics. It will also be of interest to NGOs, fisherfolk organizations, and to those concerned with issues of nationalism, marginalized populations and international borders.
"
that delve into complex geographies of communal identities in
modern South Asia. It situates these papers at a significant intersection
of spatial histories and historical geographies of the region,
with a focus on exploring the intricate relationship between community
and religious identity on the one hand, and space and scale
on the other. We take a broad view of communal geographies,
reconsidering spatiality through community histories that encompass
diverse contexts such as local mohallas and national statistics,
rural and urban settings, and secular and religious spaces. It illustrates
how religious communities have mapped their identities
onto everyday arenas like borders, gurdwaras, homes, markets,
mosques, shops, streets and temples. Drawing from various disciplinary
and theoretical perspectives and employing methodologies
ranging from archival research to oral history and ethnography, this
special section expands our understanding of how social practices
and religious interactions leave their footprints on geography.
Yashoda Devi, and a Shudra, Santram B.A. In the context of an
efflorescence of vernacular sexology literature in early twentiethcentury
North India, it explicates how their writings moved along
different registers, whereby they envisaged a heterosexual ethics
that relied on utopian and dystopian descriptions of modernity.
Sexology in Hindi, particularly when construed from the margins,
reified, constructed, destabilised and questioned sexual norms.
The article argues that while largely operating within reformist
sexology frames, their writings at times punctured dominant
upper-caste, male-centric authority and created frictions in normative
equations. Together, their writings contribute significantly to
creating a vernacular archive of sexual sciences in India.
Europe by Swami Satyadev ‘Parivrajak’ (1879–1961), one of the
first persons to systematically write travelogues in Hindi. I argue
that Parivrajak’s travel literature was part of a colonised nation’s
attempt to reclaim a space of freedom, forged through the carving
of ‘perfect masculine bodies’, which embodied his ideals of
beauty and pleasure. It was a performative, political act that
inscribed gendered landscapes with a dialogue between East and
West, slavery and freedom. The Hindu male’s subaltern masculinity
had to be overcome through diverse means, all of which
metaphorically interacted to shape Parivrajak’s writings.
short translations, that redraw the boundaries of literary histories
both temporally and spatially. The essays, rooted in the humanities
and informed by interdisciplinary area studies, explore multiple
linkages between forms of print culture, linguistic identities
and diverse vernacular literary spaces in colonial and post-colonial
South Asia. The essays and translations foreground complex and
politicised expressions of gender and genre in fictional and nonfictional
print materials and thus draw meaningful connections
between the vernacular and literature, the everyday and the marginals,
and gender and sentiment. Collectively, they expand vernacular
literary archives, canons and genealogies, and push us to
theorise the nature of writing in South Asia.
Through the life of Santram, this paper will attempt to illuminate a social history of caste in north India. It will examine Santram’s accounts of the caste self, social reform and nation, and the stories he told others about himself, his life, and his anti-caste thought. His narratives not only show how his life was marked by caste, but also tell us as much about the private and the public, the self and nation, the individual and the community, the intimate and the social. His writings effortlessly moved between these worlds, offering us a glimpse of Santam the individual, the anti-caste reformer and the family man. They were as much social caste histories of his times, as they were reflections of the caste self. The paper will argue that Santam’s encounters in society helped shape a counter-narrative of caste, symbolized in the ‘Jat Pat Torak Mandal’. It will underline that the interplay of self, caste and Hinduism in his writings defies any neat readings, and cannot be bound by rubrics of glorification or demolition. His thought not only reflects the mutable positions on caste, but also reveals paradoxical ways in which reformers were caught amidst destabilizing changes in colonial India. While Santram has remained on the margins of academic scholarship, his life narrative produced multiple meanings of caste, where on the one hand, he became a staunch advocate of inter-caste marriages, and on the other, he enacted a language of caste reform and respectability, with ambiguous implications. It is this contradictory straddling that makes his life narrative both a complex and politicized form of resistance and critique of caste, while simultaneously appearing as an account of accepted caste models and messages.
afresh through the use of popular print culture, vernacular missionary literature, writings of Hindu publicists and caste ideologues, cartoons, and police reports from colonial north India. It particularly looks at the two sites of clothing and romance to mark representations
of mass and individual conversions to Christianity and Islam. Through them, it reads conversions by Dalit women as acts that embodied a language of intimate rights, and were accounts of resistant materialities. These simultaneously produced deep
anxieties and everyday violence among ideologues of the Arya Samaj and other such groups, where there was both an erasure and a representational heightening of Dalit female desire. However, they also provide one with avenues to recover in part Dalit women’s aspirations in this period.