Coming of Age in Nineteenth-Century India
The Girl-Child and the Art of Playfulness

In this eloquent history, Ruby Lal traces the lives of nineteenth-century Indian women in their transition from girlhood to maturity.

Ruby Lal (Author)

9781107030244, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 18 February 2013

247 pages, 4 b/w illus. 2 maps
23.5 x 15.7 x 1.7 cm, 0.45 kg

'As an ambitious project, interrogating the marginalized figure of the girl-child through imaginative concepts rupturing historical chronology, [this book] will certainly enrich the repertoire of women's history and stimulate further research.' Swapna M. Banerjee, Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth

In this engaging and eloquent history, Ruby Lal traces the becoming of nineteenth-century Indian women through a critique of narratives of linear transition from girlhood to womanhood. In the north Indian patriarchal environment, women's lives were dominated by the expectations of the male universal, articulated most clearly in household chores and domestic duties. The author argues that girls and women in the early nineteenth century experienced freedoms, eroticism, adventurousness and playfulness, even within restrictive circumstances. Although women in the colonial world of the later nineteenth century remained agential figures, their activities came to be constrained by more firmly entrenched domestic norms. Lal skillfully marks the subtle and complex alterations in the multifaceted female subject in a variety of nineteenth-century discourses, elaborated in four different sites - forest, school, household, and rooftops.

1. Texts, spaces, histories
2. The woman of the forest
3. The woman of the school
4. The woman of the household
5. The woman of the rooftops.

Subject Areas: Gender studies: women [JFSJ1], Islam [HRH], Asian history [HBJF], History [HB]