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Uses the everyday histories of Brahmin clans, communities, and families in a prominent small town in the Indian Himalaya to challenge the assumption that only grand metanarratives such as colonialism and nationalism matter.
This everyday history of clans, communities, and elite families in Almora, a prominent town in the Indian Himalaya, puts questions of belonging at the heart of an expansive examination of elite Hinduism. Studying a mountainous region sometimes considered marginal within Indian history, Sanjay Joshi explores critically important mainstream concerns via attention to the periphery. Revealing the connections between two meanings of "belonging"—one as a source of identity, the other indicating possession—he addresses large questions: What is the idea of belonging among upper-caste Hindus? How do their ideas of belonging and community change over time? And to what effect? Refusing to conflate the ordinary and everyday with the trivial, Joshi challenges the frequent assumption that only metanarratives such as colonialism and nationalism matter. His exploration of big issues incorporates a plea for attention to the local and the quotidian as equally essential for a proper historical understanding. In addition to state and institutional archives, Joshi draws on unconventional and previously untapped sources: novels, poetry, local-language newspapers, and over six hundred family papers, including rare examples of women's writing within family contexts.
"Since readable academic history is often something of an oxymoron, this book is especially welcome. Joshi discusses academic concepts through an analysis of commonplace social and political events to which nonspecialists can relate. His history of the local and its particularities deepens our understanding of caste, clan, and social power by suggesting the need to use but remain wary of the possible obscurities of concepts, theorizations, and overarching frameworks. The everyday, local, and even personal issues examined here make for a more intimate appreciation of larger social and political developments. This stands in contrast, though not in contradiction, to the more standard histories and metahistories written up as imposing and impersonal grand sagas." — Chetan Singh, author of Himalayan Histories: Economy, Polity, Religious Traditions
Sanjay Joshi is Professor of History at Northern Arizona University. He is the author of Fractured Modernity: The Making of a Middle Class in Colonial North India, and the editor of The Middle Class in Colonial India.
Acknowledgements
Glossary of Hindi and Kumaoni Terms
Abbreviations
Introduction
The "Other" Woman and What it Means to Belong
Almora and the Local Elite
Structure of the Book
Ideas of "Belonging"
Beyond Almora: Missing Narratives
Complicated Belonging
1. Conversion, Conflict, and Community: Names and the Making of Kumaoni Elites, 1850–1900
Miss Sunday of Almora and Miss 1933 the Film
Missionaries and Brahmins
Upper-Caste Converts
Juniya: Understanding Lower-Caste Conversion
The Gendered Convert
Returning to Miss Sunday
2. Clans, Community, and Belonging in Colonial Kumaon, C. 1850–1930
Almora and Kumaon's Brahmin Elites
Communities and the Historiography of South Asia
Bholadutt Pande and Overseas Travel
Community and Capital
Emotional Ties of Community
Gender: The Missing Variable
About Communities and Belonging
3. Resentful Docility and Incomplete Belonging: Women, Men, and Marriages in Almora 1890–1940s
My Grandfather's Diary
A Wife as Companion
Making Marriages and Marital Tensions
Walking the Talk: Performing Conjugality
Living a Married Life
The Widow's Might
"Resentful Docility": The Quiet Insubordination of Married Women
Incomplete and Conflicted Belonging
Afterword: Listening to the Archives
4. Belonging in the Public: Caste, Gender, and the Limits of Kumaoni Elite Power in the Twentieth Century
The Erosion of Dominance: Brahmins, Shilpakars, and Nayaks
Belonging in Public: Changing Contexts and Anxieties
Nayaks and New Notions of Conjugality
Shilpakars and Differences in Ideas of Belonging
Nayaks and Gendered Belonging
A Fragile Hegemony
Crumbling Hegemony: Resistance to Elite Ideas of Belonging
Reinscribing Belonging: Mixed Results
Epilogue
5. Conclusions
Emotions, Power, and the Incompleteness of Belonging
What Can Almora Tell Us About Belonging?
History and "Hagi-Muti Baat": The Importance of Subordinated Histories
Bibliography
Index