The Nehru Memorial Museum and Library
cordially invites you to the Weekly Seminar
at 3.00 pm on Tuesday, 9 April, 2013
in the Seminar Room, First Floor, Library Building
on
'Stating the Mutiny:
Prostitutes and the cantonment bazaar in the making of 1857'
by
Prof. William Pinch,
Wesleyan University, Connecticut, USA.
Abstract:
Standard accounts of the military mutiny at Meerut on May 10th, 1857, have longpointed to the key role that prostitutes (or, depending on whom you read, courtesans)played in encouraging the sepoys to rise up in revolt. The talk will examine the way thisparticular historical narrative has evolved over the past 150 years, and will juxtapose itto other accounts of women in and around the cantonment bazaar in the mid and late1850s. The goal of the lecture is to move us from a discussion of the familiar "why" of1857 to the stranger "what" of military culture, especially as it was enacted in theunusual and increasingly rigid and divided hybrid space that was the mid nineteenth-century north Indian cantonment. The talk hopes to show that, whether or not theystarted the military mutiny at Meerut, women were pivotal to the emotionaltopography of the soldier's world.
Speaker:
Prof. William Pinch is Professor of History at Wesleyan University. He earned his PhDin History at the University of Virginia in 1990. He has written two books, Peasants andMonks in British India (California 1996) and Warrior Ascetics and IndianEmpires (Cambridge 2006), many articles and essays, and is the editor of Speaking ofPeasants: Essays in Indian History and Politics in Honor of Walter Hauser (Delhi 2008). Prof.Pinch's teaching focuses on South Asian history, world history, religion and history, andmaritime history. This year he is a Fulbright-Nehru Senior Research Scholar based inNew Delhi.
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