The Subhedar's son. A narrative of Brahmin-Christian conversion from nineteenth-century Maharashtra. By Deepra Dandekar. (American Academy of Religion. Religion in Translation.) Pp. xliv + 222 incl. 5 ills. Oxford–New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. £64. 978 0 19 091404 2
The Journal of Ecclesiastical History
Uploads
Papers by Being Deepra
who was seven years old at the time of Partition. Now resident in
California, Zeba Rizvi was interviewed as part of the 1947 Partition
Archive project, archived at the Stanford University Library. In this article,
I interrogate relationships between memories and emotions of Partition,
reconstituted through oral history that suggests the additional reframing
of Partition-memory archives as an emotions archive. While Zeba’s
interview reveals how emotional gaps are arbitrated by rapport, or
absence thereof, I argue, using a phenomenological approach, that
Partition memory-emotions conform to the narrator’s evolving and
dynamic sense of self through time, that is also evident in the interview.
Zeba Rizvi resists and reconstructs the politics of Partition in agential
ways, using art to express secularism and its emotions: love-pyar, while
re-inscribing and conforming to Ashraf values of gender, class and the
celebration of heritage.
body through the analysis of a Marathi Christian didactic tract dated to 1871 that establishes epidemiological associations between the colonial regulation of pilgrimage and the spread of disease and epidemics. After locating the text published by the Bombay Tract and Book Society, within the larger context of nineteenth-century missionary literature in Maharashtra, I will look at the roles it delegates to the vernacular and native body. My ensuing analysis primarily focuses on the politics of epidemic control, and its representation in Marathi Christian didactic tracts. I will show how they deployed the native Christian body as an instrument of democratic political dissent.