Charu Gupta
Charu Gupta is Senior Professor in the Department of History, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Delhi. She has been a Visiting Professor and ICCR Chair at the University of Vienna, a Visiting Faculty at the Yale University, the Washington University and the University of Hawaii. She has also been a Fellow at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, Delhi, the Social Science Research Council, New York, the Asian Scholarship Foundation, Thailand, the Wellcome Institute, London, and the University of Oxford. She is the author of Sexuality, Obscenity, Community: Women, Muslims and the Hindu Public in Colonial India (Permanent Black, Delhi, 2001 & Palgrave, New York, 2002) (paperbacks 2005, 2008, 2012; kindle e-book 2013), and The Gender of Caste: Representing Dalits in Print (Permanent Black, India & University of Washington Press, 2016; paperback 2017). She is also the editor of Gendering Colonial India: Reforms, Print, Caste and Communalism (Orient Blackswan, Delhi, 2012). She has published several papers in national-international journals on themes of sexualities, masculinities, caste and religious identities. She is presently working on life narratives in Hindi in early twentieth century north India.
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Research Papers by Charu Gupta
that delve into complex geographies of communal identities in
modern South Asia. It situates these papers at a significant intersection
of spatial histories and historical geographies of the region,
with a focus on exploring the intricate relationship between community
and religious identity on the one hand, and space and scale
on the other. We take a broad view of communal geographies,
reconsidering spatiality through community histories that encompass
diverse contexts such as local mohallas and national statistics,
rural and urban settings, and secular and religious spaces. It illustrates
how religious communities have mapped their identities
onto everyday arenas like borders, gurdwaras, homes, markets,
mosques, shops, streets and temples. Drawing from various disciplinary
and theoretical perspectives and employing methodologies
ranging from archival research to oral history and ethnography, this
special section expands our understanding of how social practices
and religious interactions leave their footprints on geography.
Yashoda Devi, and a Shudra, Santram B.A. In the context of an
efflorescence of vernacular sexology literature in early twentiethcentury
North India, it explicates how their writings moved along
different registers, whereby they envisaged a heterosexual ethics
that relied on utopian and dystopian descriptions of modernity.
Sexology in Hindi, particularly when construed from the margins,
reified, constructed, destabilised and questioned sexual norms.
The article argues that while largely operating within reformist
sexology frames, their writings at times punctured dominant
upper-caste, male-centric authority and created frictions in normative
equations. Together, their writings contribute significantly to
creating a vernacular archive of sexual sciences in India.
Europe by Swami Satyadev ‘Parivrajak’ (1879–1961), one of the
first persons to systematically write travelogues in Hindi. I argue
that Parivrajak’s travel literature was part of a colonised nation’s
attempt to reclaim a space of freedom, forged through the carving
of ‘perfect masculine bodies’, which embodied his ideals of
beauty and pleasure. It was a performative, political act that
inscribed gendered landscapes with a dialogue between East and
West, slavery and freedom. The Hindu male’s subaltern masculinity
had to be overcome through diverse means, all of which
metaphorically interacted to shape Parivrajak’s writings.
short translations, that redraw the boundaries of literary histories
both temporally and spatially. The essays, rooted in the humanities
and informed by interdisciplinary area studies, explore multiple
linkages between forms of print culture, linguistic identities
and diverse vernacular literary spaces in colonial and post-colonial
South Asia. The essays and translations foreground complex and
politicised expressions of gender and genre in fictional and nonfictional
print materials and thus draw meaningful connections
between the vernacular and literature, the everyday and the marginals,
and gender and sentiment. Collectively, they expand vernacular
literary archives, canons and genealogies, and push us to
theorise the nature of writing in South Asia.
Through the life of Santram, this paper will attempt to illuminate a social history of caste in north India. It will examine Santram’s accounts of the caste self, social reform and nation, and the stories he told others about himself, his life, and his anti-caste thought. His narratives not only show how his life was marked by caste, but also tell us as much about the private and the public, the self and nation, the individual and the community, the intimate and the social. His writings effortlessly moved between these worlds, offering us a glimpse of Santam the individual, the anti-caste reformer and the family man. They were as much social caste histories of his times, as they were reflections of the caste self. The paper will argue that Santam’s encounters in society helped shape a counter-narrative of caste, symbolized in the ‘Jat Pat Torak Mandal’. It will underline that the interplay of self, caste and Hinduism in his writings defies any neat readings, and cannot be bound by rubrics of glorification or demolition. His thought not only reflects the mutable positions on caste, but also reveals paradoxical ways in which reformers were caught amidst destabilizing changes in colonial India. While Santram has remained on the margins of academic scholarship, his life narrative produced multiple meanings of caste, where on the one hand, he became a staunch advocate of inter-caste marriages, and on the other, he enacted a language of caste reform and respectability, with ambiguous implications. It is this contradictory straddling that makes his life narrative both a complex and politicized form of resistance and critique of caste, while simultaneously appearing as an account of accepted caste models and messages.