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‘Home and the World’: Cosmopolitan, transnational identities of courtly Indian women in the late imperial zenana

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 March 2015

ANGMA D. JHALA
ANGMA D. JHALA*
Affiliation:
Department of History, Bentley University, Waltham, Massachusetts, United States of America Email: ajhala@bentley.edu
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Abstract

This article examines the cosmopolitan world of the colonial zenana through the marriages of two mid-twentieth-century royal Indian women, Maharani Brijraj Kumari of Dhrangadhra and Maharani Krishna Kumari of Jodhpur. In particular, it analyses the close connection between zenana women's education and emergent adolescent sexuality. These women ordinarily began their studies in mixed-gender classrooms with their brothers and male cousins as children. As they neared the age of menarche, girls were extracted from the formal schoolroom and undertook instruction in household management and childcare in preparation for their expected roles as wives and mothers. Despite being prematurely cut off from the childhood classroom, women's educational backgrounds (in both Western and Indic forms of knowledge) and future learning potential remained an important part of their postmarital identity. Young, anglicized Indian men increasingly desired wives who reflected the modernity that they hoped to represent as imperial subjects and were encouraged to adopt by British advisors and tutors. They required wives who would not wear pardah and thus reflect more Western ideals of companionate marriages of friendship, yet simultaneously live in gender-segregated palace quarters, uphold traditional kinship networks, perform religious duties, and engage in the maintenance of a large polygamous household. Definitions of sex, marriage, and domesticity were increasingly cross-cultural and pan-historical in nature, incorporating aspects both of the ‘modern’ and the ‘traditional’, the Indic and the European, the regional and the transnational.

Type
Research Article
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 49 , Issue 6 , November 2015 , pp. 1704 - 1731
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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References

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59 K. Kumari, 2 July 1999.

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62 Jhala, ‘Marriage, Hierarchy and Identity’, pp. 33–34.

63 B. Kumari, interviews with the author, Suraj Mahal Palace, Dhrangadhra, 26 July–10 August 1999.

64 For fuller discussion of these wedding nights, refer to Chapter 3 of my book, Courtly Indian Women in Late Imperial India.

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71 B. Kumari, 17–19 July 1999.

72 Ibid.

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74 Ibid.