Coming of Age in Nineteenth-Century India: The Girl-Child and the Art of Playfulness

by Ruby Lal

In this engaging and eloquent history, Ruby Lal traces the becoming of nineteenth-century Indian women through a critique of narratives of linear transition from girlhood to womanhood. In the north Indian patriarchal environment, women's lives were dominated by the expectations of the male universal, articulated most clearly in household chores and domestic duties. The author argues that girls and women in the early nineteenth century experienced freedoms, eroticism, adventurousness and playfulness, even within restrictive circumstances. Although women in the colonial world of the later nineteenth century continued to be agential figures, their activities came to be constrained by more firmly entrenched domestic norms. Lal skillfully marks the subtle and complex alterations in the multifaceted female subject in a variety of nineteenth-century discourses, which are elaborated in four different sites – forest, school, household, and rooftop.

Genres: History, Nonfiction

247 pages, Hardcover

First published November 12, 2012

About the author

Ruby Lal is professor of South Asian history at Emory University. She is the author of Empress: The Astonishing Reign of Nur Jahan, Domesticity and Power in the Early Mughal World, and Coming of Age in Nineteenth Century India: The Girl-Child and the Art of Playfulness.

Reviews

[Colleen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Textbook discussing the creation of school books during colonial India and how the stories in them were adapted from oral tradition to written and what was changed. Lal discusses the ideas of womanhood and the spaces life is lived, as is reflected in tales. She also challenges the ideas of girl- and womanhood in India and how much of what we think is tradition is actually adaptation to changes and outside point of views. It has some very interesting points, but does get repetitive when read straight through.