2019-2020

The Theses from the Academic Year 2019-2020 are from Maya Haider, Pratiti, Revanth Ukkalam and Rohini Sharma.

  • Maya Haider

Thesis Title: Home Away from Home: Deconstructing the Work-Leisure Binary in the Gentleman’s Club in Colonial India

Advisor: Rudrangshu Mukherjee

The Gentleman's Club in India cannot be understood in binary terms of work and leisure. Not simply a free space detached entirely from the ordered outside world, the colonial club was rather an equally rigid sphere wherein the removal of members’ official roles came with the adoption of new rules and structures that required the performance of other duties as agents of the empire. Through themes of "recreation" and "re-creation", this paper explores patterns of leisure and the growth of gentleman's clubs in 19th century London, and their subsequent reconfiguration in colonial cities and mofussils. Through Marxist historian E.P. Thompson's Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism and Ranajit Guha's essay The Advent of Punctuality, we can trace the transposition of a capitalist-oriented attitude to the colonial mission where just like for the British working population, time for Indian subjects was detached from their natural work patterns, establishing a continuum where controlling time became a means of exercising authority. By definition unproductive in the capitalist sense, leisure, and indeed the club, then constituted an entirely separate realm in the lives of men.

In Britain, the goals of the 19th century gentleman's clubs were to, at the same time, replicate the privileges of the gentleman’s existence through policies of exclusivity, while providing him refuge from the normal conditions of these privileges through the facilitation of privacy and emotional freedom. These goals laid the foundation for what the Club in the imperial outposts were to look like in the endeavour to create a miniature Britain in India. The isolation and hierarchy at the heart of empire meant that conscious efforts were made by British exiles to foster a sense of community life, with the Club proving to be particularly effective in delineating physical and racial boundaries of their community. The British in India and The British in Bengal by David Gilmour and S.C. Ghosh, give extensive accounts of the social composition and recreational life of the British in India and Bengal in the 18th and 19th centuries, of an internally diverse and stratified population who being clearly outnumbered and isolated, found leisure to be an important escape. The Club reinforced many of these structures and hierarchies, where factors like age and occupational seniority mattered a great deal. Conflicts arising in this space play out in the novels Burmese Days and A Passage to India, where the club occupies a central role. In interrogating these literary representations centred on the social etiquette of class and racial distinctions, transgressions to these norms reveal much about the authority of the institution, as well as about themes of racial exclusivity, subject formation, the marriage market in the empire, and rules of membership and elections in clubs. The ideological backgrounds of the two authors serve as significant points of interest, as well.

  • Pratiti

Title: A City of Democracy: Nehru and The Making of Chandigarh

Advisor: Mahesh Rangarajan

Chandigarh, one of the first large cities in post-independence India was built through the 1950s in India. This city, along with the Bhakra Nangal Dam project, came to be one of the most ambitious projects of the Indian Government in Nehru's early years of prime ministership. The project was headed, at different points of time, by two architects-- the American architect Albert Mayer, and the world-famous French architect Le Corbusier. It was a largely administrative city, which was to serve as the capital of the State of Punjab. My thesis aims to see how the city became a symbol of democracy for Punjab, for India, and also for the world.

The post-colonial period is marked with not only changes in the political and social system but is also a reimagination of previously colonized spaces. My thesis looks at the process of imagination and making of a space, how that is a manifestation of power and ideology. Chandigarh is a symbol of change. It is a shift from the colonial cities that have been built throughout the early 20th centuries. It is a shift in the type of people working on the project, and therefore what a city like this would symbolise. My thesis aims to capture this change and tries to locate that into the process of democracy that is key to the idea of post-colonial India. My thesis looks at how Chandigarh is a manifestation of democracy and self-determination for India. It is also looks at how Chandigarh was imagined as this catharsis for the Partition and how it manifested, and how much of this healing was done by building a city that represented democracy in Punjab.

  • Revanth Ukkalam

Title: Did Ancient Indians Travel? : The Idea, Praxis, and Economy of Travel in the Jataka Tales

Advisor: Nayanjot Lahiri

The English vocabulary is highly qualified and extremely specialised and so are our notions and imagination of the world which feed into and out of that vocabulary. How would Ancient India answer when targeted with the question “what does it mean to travel?” Does travel for its own sake exist? If not, how was movement understood?

Travel in the context of Ancient India has been explored hitherto in intersection with trade largely; and additionally in relation to religion. However the movement of people and communities would not have been limited to these domains alone. Moreover it is imperative that a study looks at the traveler in the common man along with the notable philosophers and powerful kings: traders, farmers, and craftsmen; men and women too.

The Jataka Tales from the Pali Canon are interesting and insightful sources of the stories of these common people. This paper seeks to understand where and why people moved; what the social institutions and material infrastructure were that supported and filliped these movements and journeys; what occupied the mind of the person who traveled. In other words: what did he look forward to and what did this person fear? From these rich and often mystifying tales, could one distill an underlying philosophy of travel? I argue that travel and a mobile life at large are essential to Buddhist philosophy and that the Jatakas’ descriptions of travel are informed by the principles of this faith. I suggest in this paper a few links that travel has to the key tenets of Buddhism.

  • Rohini Sharma

Title: What did Women do Differently?: Exploring Gender and Caste in Stri Darpan (1909-1928)

Advisor: Aparna Vaidik

The process of women’s self-conscious identification in colonial north India can be dated back to the beginning of the twentieth century. Hindi print culture was already populated with diktats and opinions on ‘the women’s question’ but now, calls for female solidarity and ideas on women’s reform entered the public space in women’s own voices. They started writing in, and publishing journals and magazines. In this form of self-representation women confronted controversial social matters unhesitatingly and politicized their personal experiences. They marked a significant break from the dominant mode of discussion about women’s reform encapsulated by male-authored domestic manuals in the late nineteenth century. These manuals endorsed women’s education only to reinforce their role as ‘pati-vrata’ and advised women on how to ideally manage their households and serve their families. However, with the turn of the century, women from the relatively privileged cross-section of society argued for direct political participation and enhanced agency within the household through their increased presence in contemporary print culture. To dissect these changes, I study six issues of the magazine Stri Darpan (January 1910- June 1910) using Barbara Rosenwien’s theoretical concept of emotional community. I argue that envisioning women as a monolithic emotional community entailed staying within, as well as breaking away from the male-authored manuals’ construction of a feminine emotional terrain. These women appropriated the men’s detached, instructive narrative and embedded it with an emotionality to identify with other women on a gendered basis and advocate for affective relationships within themselves. However, I emphasize that this aspiration emerged among women belonging to the same cross-section of society as the men writing before them- high caste, upper-class households who wishfully viewed Indian women as homogenous subjects, reducing caste as a social distinction, to a distinct echo within this fantasy.


Photograph by Daksha Gupta, Undergraduate Batch of 2020