2020-2021

The Theses from the Academic Year 2020-2021 are from Akshaj Awasthi, Aratrika Sengupta, Aritra Ghosh and Dhiya Soni.

  • Akshaj Awasthi

Thesis Title: Power as Patronage: Imperial Art and Architecture under the Mughals and the Ottomans

Advisor: Pratyay Nath


  • Aratrika Sengupta

Thesis Title: Medicization of Sexuality in Colonial india

Advisor: Aparna Vaidik

Although there is evidence of homosexual love from the early medieval sculptures of the Khajuraho temple, and in Amir Khusrau’s poetry poems and the Company artwork right up to the twentieth century, modern Indian historical scholarship does not pay adequate attention to it. The glaring absence of people who engaged in same-sex activities or queer people begins with the colonial archives. Homosexuality was criminalized during in colonial India under Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code as the British officials preferred the gender binary. Barring the presence of a few colonial court cases under section 377, there is little to no evidence of same-sex relations in the archives. Therefore, in order to study queer history, one has to question the idea of the archives as the repository of knowledge, a site on where history is embedded.

My thesis will explore the question: In what way did same-sex desire disrupt the narrative of heterosexual marriage in colonial India?’. This thesis begins with foregrounding the inadequacy of the categories of ‘LGBTQ+’ and ‘queer’ for understanding the same-sex desires in a historical context. It will analyze the queer presence in the institution of heterosexual marriage in British India. To do so my primary sources will be: a popular marriage manual known as Dampatya Prem written and published by Yashoda Devi in 1933. She was an ayurvedic practitioner who was also a prolific writer. She wrote texts on everyday ayurvedic solutions to everyday problems that catered to housewives. Her main specialization was curing the illness of women especially their sexual problems like excessive menstrual bleeding, repeated miscarriage and barrenness. Sexuality engaged her constant attention and was seen by her in scientific, medical and moralistic terms. Her books constantly talked of her clients' sexual lives. Dampatya Prem (1933) was specifically devoted to it. The second primary text that I draw on is Havelock Ellis’ Sexual Inversion was first published in 1900. Sexual Inversion was the first monograph that tried to popularize the idea that the homosexual ‘instincts’ were just an extension of natural instincts. It did so through detailed psychology of sex across continents and cultures to understand homosexual desire. The book's major contribution was to define homosexuality as a "'sport' or variation, one of those organic aberrations we see through living nature"; like "coloured-hearing," or synesthesia, this was a case where "there is not so much defect, as an abnormality producing new and involuntary combinations". It suggested that homosexuality should not be subject to legal persecution, and the book stood as an implicit challenge to the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act, under which Oscar Wilde had been famously convicted shortly before the book's appearance. With the help of both the texts I will try to understand the queer presence in colonial India, the ‘scientific’ discourse around it, and its the socio-cultural reception. In doing so, the thesis will explore the traditional boundaries of the binaries of feminine and masculine, and how the queer either challenged or confirmed it.


  • Aritra Ghosh

Thesis Title: Reproducing gender? The Political Dialectic of Embodiment within the Mahabharata

Advisor: Upinder Singh

This thesis attempts to construct a history of the ideas of gender and embodiment within the Mahābhārata. In so doing, it means to highlight exactly how crucial and important a study in gendered embodiment within such texts as the Mahābhārata is, in attempting to understand – or at the very least, in attempting to get a sense of – the social consciousness within which a particular text in its conception and coming together, once inhered. It begins with the basic history of the epic, and a very brief exploration of the ways in which gender and embodiment have usually been studied by scholars when it comes to the Mahābhārata. Thereafter, it attempts to move beyond the usual frames through which gendered embodiment has been understood in the text, so as to get a greater sense of the reproductive anxiety which is clearly present through the text, and of the gendered consciousness of the text, which is racked by this anxiety in the first place. In so doing, the processes of appropriation and contra-appropriation are highlighted as doing of and for the gendered aspect, so as to get a sense of the politics of the reproductive anxiety which permeates the narrative of the Mahābhārata. This is in its turn, explained in terms of three broad categories. Finally, an attempt to pin down this survey of the gendered consciousness and its reproductive anxiety to its socio-historical contexts is made.


  • Dhiya Sony

Thesis Title: Tracing the Mappila in the Malabar Coast: An Etymological Study

Advisor: Mahmood Kooriadathodi

The history of medieval Kerala is inextricably linked to that of trade and travel in the Indian Ocean. Transoceanic movement between a vast array of nationalities and cultures, especially from beyond the Indian subcontinent, have led to a high degree of non-material transfer in the area. The most notable amongst such exchanges was the spread of Abrahamic religions along the shores of the subcontinent by West Asian merchant and missionary groups through their interaction with the indigenous societies. The local Muslim, Jewish and Christian communities that came into being as a result were called mappila, distinguished from each other through prefixes such as Jonaka, Juda and Nasrani respectively. The Jewish traders of Kerala or the Yuda Mappilas were categorised after their settlements at Kadavumbagam, Thekkumbhagam, Parur, Chendamangalam, and Mala, and were called Mappilas even though they never insisted on the title themselves. In the past, Syrian Christians insisted on the privilege of using Mappila as a surname but progressively ceased doing so and began calling themselves Nasrani. Meanwhile, Muslims of Malabar continue to use the word to describe and distinguish themselves from the Persian-originated North Indian Muslims. This terminology still exists and Muslims in Northern Kerala are, to this day, called Mappila Muslims.


Interestingly, the root of culturally amorphous term mappila is highly contested and is explained in many different ways. Through my thesis, I explore the various theories that attempt to explain the source of this word and propose my own theory regarding the same. Moreover, the thesis also looks at why the word mappila evolved in its meaning- from being applied to all religious communities to becoming exclusively for the Malabar Muslims.