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REVIEWS
| Unfamiliar Relations: Family and History in South Asia. Indrani Chatterjee, ed. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004. 302 pp.).
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| An ambitious and original set of essays, Unfamiliar Relations extends the study of the history of the family into South Asia. Once the purview of European history, where the rise of the nuclear family was linked to industrialization, the emergence of the bourgeoisie, and the rise of various disciplinary bodily practices, this volume demonstrates the ways in which concepts of the family can be understood on the Indian subcontinent in the early modern world. |
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The volume makes two important interventions. The first is to break down the assumption that the family's dynamics can be contained within a private space that is cordoned off from the public. In reminding us that family politics were often tied up with questions of dynastic succession and governance, particularly in the houses of ruling elites, several of the essays in the volume follow in the fine tradition of, for instance, Leslie Peirce's The Imperial Harem: Women and Sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). Ramya Sreenivasan's contribution is a highly original and thoughtful essay arguing that narrating family genealogies was a way of establishing political authority in precolonial Rajasthan, while Sumit Guha's contribution examines the ways in which family feuds were negotiations over political power in eighteenth-century western India. William Dalrymple's account of the affair between James Kirkpatrick, a British political representative, and Khair un nissa, a young noblewoman of the court at Hyderabad, shows how theirs was both a romantic and political attachment between competing groups in an open and fluid political landscape. These three pieces elaborate the ways in which women were central to precolonial politics in the ways that they managed the different stages in their lives and negotiated the demands made of them. |
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