Fashioning the Pious Self: Middle Class Religiosity in Colonial India
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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. The emphasis on physical space makes room for understanding the household as a living social site of tellings and retellings that coexists with other overlapping publics and counterpublics. The reformist piety which became the hallmark of the middle class was fashioned under the watchful eyes of peers, superiors, and spouses in these spaces. It was appraised, acknowledged, emulated, and perfected through networks that belied the public-private divide. This dissertation focuses on the institution of the household as one such site in the network to suggest that the radical reordering of the household in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries enabled the emergence of personal piety. The history of reformist piety can be retold as the history of the reconfigured household. Furthermore, the re-imagination of the woman as a chaste and loyal spouse was fundamental to her elevation as an independent spiritual actor of the household. The spiritual independence of the wife, however, was predicated on her social, economic, and legal subordination to the husband. Degree Type Dissertation Degree Name Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Graduate Group South Asia Regional Studies First Advisor Ramya Sreenivasan Subject Categories History This dissertation is available at ScholarlyCommons: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/2386 FASHIONING THE PIOUS SELF: MIDDLE CLASS RELIGIOSITY IN COLONIAL INDIA Darakhshan H Khan A DISSERTATION in South Asia Regional Studies Presented to the Faculties of the University of Pennsylvania in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2016 Supervisor of Dissertation _______________________ Ramya Sreenivasan Associate Professor, Department of South Asia Studies Graduate Group Chairperson _______________________ Daud Ali, Associate Professor, Department of South Asia Studies Dissertation Committee Ramya Sreenivasan, Associate Professor, Department of South Asia Studies Lisa Mitchell, Associate Professor, Department of South Asia Studies Daud Ali, Associate Professor, Department of South Asia Studies FASHIONING THE PIOUS SELF: MIDDLE CLASS RELIGIOSITY IN COLONIAL INDIA COPYRIGHT 2016 Darakhshan H Khan To the loving memory of my father. To my mother. iii ACKNOWLEDGMENT The seed of this project was planted in the mid-1990s, on a Friday afternoon in Bombay, when my mother dragged me to a women’s meeting of Tablighi Jamaat, an Islamic proselytizing movement that believes in self-improvement as the stepping stone to reforming the community. Week after week, I sat through the meetings, listening to women sermonize about the horrors of Judgement Day and the joys of Paradise. The passion of the speakers struck me, especially in comparison to my inability to be moved by the discourse of death and repentance. Almost two decades later, the project has come to fruition half way across the world, and I would like to thank the women of the Jamaat for introducing me to the world of Islamic reform. Women who cannot be named because the norms of feminine modesty espoused by the Tablighi Jamaat forbids them from being identified. Over the course of many years, and especially during my ethnographic fieldwork in Bombay and Delhi, these women opened up their homes and their hearts to me. Even as they tried to ‘reform’ me, they held back their judgements, and for that I am grateful to them. My research year in India was funded by the American Institute of Indian Studies’ junior fellowship as well as short-term research funds disbursed by the Dean’s office at the University of Pennsylvania. I am grateful to these institutions for supporting my work and making this project possible. iv The project, as it exists today, would not have been completed without the guidance and encouragement of my doctoral committee—Dr. Ramya Sreenivasan, Dr. Lisa Mitchell, and Dr. Daud Ali. In our first meeting, Dr Sreenivasan asked me if I had finally found “my space” in the US. She elaborated by asking if the American light switches that worked ever so differently from the ones back home still annoyed me and if I had found that one shop that stocked clothes that fit me well. Before the meeting ended, I knew I had found my advisor. Ramya’s concern for the emotional well-being of her students is matched by her intellectual generosity, her unflinching support, and her insights into navigating the academic system as a young woman. A mention must also be made about her incredible ability to recall book titles, complete with the colour of the cover, a testament to the depth of her engagement with her field of study. The faith and confidence she has in my work is humbling and exhilarating at once. If I can make any claim about the interdisciplinary nature of my work, it is only because I have been mentored by Dr. Mitchell. This is not simply because Lisa is the anthropologist among the historians on my committee, but because her dogged insistence on asking broad questions about methodology and sources has encouraged me to borrow texts and methods from the disciplines of Religious Studies, Literary Studies, and Anthropology. As graduate students doing coursework, we knew that Lisa was the scholar who would bring the “methods questions” to the table, and as I was writing the introduction to the dissertation, I became aware of the impact her questions have had on my work. v Dr Ali put together an entire course on Islam in South India because his graduate students wanted guidance in navigating new scholarship on the topic. In reading the texts with us, he helped us read the texts without his assistance. He has always insisted that a good historian is one who can imagine the complexities of the social world of which only a sliver is preserved in the archives. I hope he can see a glimpse of that imagination in this dissertation. Dr Jamal Elias has been an invaluable interlocutor and an encyclopedia of Islamic legal terminology. I have knocked on his office door for citations, popular culture references, and to talk about sticky questions that might pop up during field work. As a Muslim woman interested in the history of Islamic reform, I was supposed to ‘have it easy’. The reality of the fieldwork was the stark opposite and on the many occasions when my respondents quizzed me about my religious beliefs in a friendly 4 am phone call, I followed Jamal’s advice: keep it simple, and it worked every time. When I walked into Dr. Rupa Viswanath’s Religion and Secularism class on the first day I was confident about where I stood with vis-à-vis the idea of the separation of state and church. It was a good idea that served countries like India very well. At the end of the three-hour lecture, everything I knew about religion and secularism was thrown out of the window, a pattern that was repeated every week. Rupa’s seminars laid the foundation of my understanding of how a text should be read, and for that I will always be indebted to her. vi I want to thank Dr. Nate Roberts for being an anthropologist’s anthropologist. He introduced me to scholarship on anthropology of religion, one edited volume at a time. He has been an excellent mentor and a kind friend. Dr. Shefali Chandra at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign introduced me to foundational texts in South Asian historiography and taught me to distinguish the postcolonial from the Marxist and the structural feminists from the cultural theorists. When I was an M.A. student, Dr. Valerie Hoffman believed that I could embark on a doctoral program, and sent me an email in the summer of 2008 that stated as much. She commented on every single sheet of paper I submitted to her, and, along with Shefali, remains my most important mentor in this country. I would also like to thank Dr Ritu Saksena and Dr Marilyn Booth for offering me a fellowship to pursue a Master’s degree at the Center for South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, thus paving the way for my doctoral studies.