Prostitutes and the cantonment bazaar in the making of 1857

 

Knowledge Hub is

 

The Nehru Memorial Museum and Library

cordially invites you to the Weekly Seminar

at 3.00 pm on Tuesday, 9 April, 2013

in the Seminar Room, First Floor, Library Building

on

'Stating the Mutiny:

Prostitutes and the cantonment bazaar in the making of 1857'

by

Prof. William Pinch,

Wesleyan University, Connecticut, USA.

Abstract:

Standard accounts of the military mutiny at Meerut on May 10th, 1857, have long pointed to the key role that prostitutes (or, depending on whom you read, courtesans) played in encouraging the sepoys to rise up in revolt. The talk will examine the way this particular historical narrative has evolved over the past 150 years, and will juxtapose it to other accounts of women in and around the cantonment bazaar in the mid and late 1850s.  The goal of the lecture is to move us from a discussion of the familiar "why" of 1857 to the stranger "what" of military culture, especially as it was enacted in the unusual and increasingly rigid and divided hybrid space that was the mid nineteenth-century north Indian cantonment.  The talk hopes to show that, whether or not they started the military mutiny at Meerut, women were pivotal to the emotional topography of the soldier's world.

Speaker:

Prof. William Pinch is Professor of History at Wesleyan University.  He earned his PhD in History at the University of Virginia in 1990.  He has written two books, Peasants and Monks in British India (California 1996) and Warrior Ascetics and Indian Empires (Cambridge 2006), many articles and essays, and is the editor of Speaking of Peasants: Essays in Indian History and Politics in Honor of Walter Hauser (Delhi 2008). Prof. Pinch's teaching focuses on South Asian history, world history, religion and history, and maritime history. This year he is a Fulbright-Nehru Senior Research Scholar based in New Delhi.

All are welcome.

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