University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations 2016 Fashioning The Pious Self: Middle Class Religiosity In Colonial India Darakhshan Haroon Khan University of Pennsylvania,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations Part of the History Commons Recommended Citation Khan, Darakhshan Haroon, "Fashioning The Pious Self: Middle Class Religiosity In Colonial India" (2016). Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 2386. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/2386 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/2386 For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Fashioning The Pious Self: Middle Class Religiosity In Colonial India Abstract Drawing on archival and ethnographic fieldwork, this dissertation examines the public construction of personal piety in nineteenth- and twentieth-century north India (1857-1930). The emergence of reformist piety, with its emphasis on individual responsibility and a focus on the self, is supposed to mark the privatization of religion, such that the public sphere becomes the site of politics and economy, and the household displaces the community as the locus of religiosity. This dissertation critiques the thesis of separate spheres to argue that the cultivation of middle class religiosity was an extremely public act that unfolded in the myriad spaces that opened up in the late nineteenth century. The middle class household, with the conjugal couple at its center, was inextricably linked to these spaces, whether it was a university campus, a newspaper office, a politicalally r , a fundraiser, or an arboretum in a hill station. Central to this thesis is the use of Michael Warner’s idea of discourse publics as an alternative framework to the Habermasian conception of the bourgeois public sphere.