Affiliation:
1. 1Centre for Historical Studies, School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India .
Abstract
It is generally assumed that colonial institutions and ideologies shaped the contours of masculinity in British India. This paper explores endogenous factors and attempts to supplement as well as contest such approaches and interpretations which claim that masculinity in India was a colonial construction. The emphasis is on folk traditions, religious customs, qaumi (folk) tales and physical culture akh???s (gymnasia) among the Jats in colonial Haryana,1 which went into the making of dominant masculinity in this region. The paper draws upon vernacular language materials and newspapers to analyse the different ways in which the socially endogenous forces constructed this masculinity. It argues that a complex interaction of popular religious traditions, qaumi narratives, military recruitment, marital caste designation, ownership of land, superior caste behaviour and strong bodily physique came to ideologically link and construct dominant masculinity in colonial Haryana.
Publisher
Enviro Research Publishers
Reference62 articles.
1. 1. During the colonial period southeast Punjab comprised the present-day Haryana region. In this paper, I have used both ‘Haryana’ and ‘colonial Haryana’ to refer to southeast Punjab.
2. 2. See, for example, Rosselli, J., The Self-Image of Effeteness: Physical Education and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Bengal, Past and Present, 86, 1980, p.p. 121-48;
3. Omissi, D., “Martial Races”: Ethnicity and Security in Colonial India, 1858-1939, War and Society, 9, 1991, p.p. 1-27;
4. Omissi, D., The Sepoy and the Raj: The Indian Army, 1660-1940, Macmillan, Houndshill, 1994;
5. Arnold, D., Bureaucratic Recruitment and Subordination in Colonial India: The Madras Constabulary, 1859-1947, in R. Guha (Ed.), Subaltern Studies 4: Writing on South Asian History and Society (p.p. 1-53), Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 1985.