Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation: Community, Religion, and Cultural Nationalism - Softcover

"First-rate... pathbreaking historical research... [combined with] a vigorous critique of the theoretical turns that South Asian Studies have recently taken under the influence of Subaltern Studies and postcolonial criticism. This is no dry-as-dust history." --Dipesh Chakrabarty, University of Chicago "An important book that recasts existing debates on nationalism... will be of interest to a wide range of scholars of colonialism and nationalism." --Journal of Asian Studies "Contribute[s] to an important set of scholarly debates over the relationship between imperialism, patriarchy, and nationalism in late 19th-century colonial India." --H-Net "A definitive and incisive piece of research." --Interventions "Tanika Sarkar uses an innovative brush to depict the development of Hindu cultural nationalism in 19-century India.... She brilliantly illuminates three classic incidents... which then become pivot points in her essays, enabling the reader to go beyond an ordinary understanding of social reality, particularly gender identity, in late 19th-century Bengal." --Asian Affairs "Brought together, these essays on Hindu cultural nationalism speak to each other... an important contribution." --Journal of Anthropological Theory

What are the major Hindu ideas and traditions of India that have shaped dominant conceptions of womanhood, domesticity, wifeliness, and mothering, and of India as a "Hindu" nation? Tanika Sarkar analyzes literary and social traditions, the elite voices and popular culture that helped create the lived reality of north India today. She explores the proto-nationalist novels of Bankimchandra Chattopadhyaya as well as scandal literature, rumors, women's memoirs, and the popular press of colonial times for the "subaltern" ideas that have shaped contemporary India. Sarkar also examines the way earlier Indian religious traditions of saintliness, sacrifice, heroism, and warfare are being subverted or transformed by militant and fundamentalist forms of Hinduism.