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Book Review
Asia
Mrinalini Sinha. Colonial Masculinity: The "Manly Englishman" and the "Effeminate Bengali" in the Late Nineteenth Century. (Studies in Imperialism.) New York: Manchester University Press: distributed by St. Martin's, New York. 1995. Pp. xi, 191. Cloth $69.95, paper $19.95.
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This study offers a compelling cultural analysis of elite politics in colonial India. By foregrounding masculinity as a critical site of power, Mrinalini Sinha recontextualizes four contentious episodes in the political history of India from the 1880s and 1890s. Customarily, the Ilbert Bill, native volunteer movement, native participation in public administration, and the age of sexual consent have been viewed as polarizing events that defined the landscape of colonial and nationalist politics. Through the prism of colonial masculinity, Sinha complicates and transforms this narrative by revealing "the multiple axes along which power was exercised in colonial India among or within the colonisers and the colonised as well as between the colonisers and the colonised" (p. l). In so doing, she illuminates the intersection of class, ethnicity, gender, and racial ideologies in constituting power and identity in colonial India. |
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