Articles by Charu Gupta

This article explores the gendered implications of the swadeshi rhetoric by focusing on how its language was creatively appropriated by the Hindu publicists of colonial United Provinces to dress up Hindu middle-class, upper-caste women in particular ways. This had implications for a new vocabulary of sartorial morality, for modern bourgeois values of thrift and for Hindu revivalism. However, swadeshi dress campaigns were also embedded in social, caste and religious hierarchies, sexual divisions and moral boundaries, exposing various tensions at the heart of the project.

The fake claim by the Hindu right that there is a "Love Jihad" organisation which is forcing Hindu women to convert to Islam through false expressions of love is similar to a campaign in the 1920s in north India against alleged "abductions". Whether 1920 or 2009, Hindu patriarchal notions appear deeply entrenched in such campaigns: images of passive victimised Hindu women at the hands of inscrutable Muslims abound, and any possibility of women exercising their legitimate right to love and their right to choice is ignored.

Contemporary Hindi dalit popular literature has emerged as a critical source for deeper insights into dalit politics and identity. This paper examines the ways in which this literature has dealt with the role of dalit women in the revolt of 1857. It interrogates both conventional and historic writings on 1857 and mainstream portrayals of dalit women and also dalit writings on the subject.

The census has always been used by communal forces to map Hindu communities, to count them, and above all to compare them with other religious communities, particularly the Muslim. Census data has been an instrument not just for enumeration, but also for comparison.

Pangs of Partition, Volume I: The Parting of Ways, and Volume II: The Human Dimension edited by S Settar and Indira Baptista Gupta; Indian Council of Historical Research, Manohar, New Delhi, 2002; pp 368+358, Rs 700 each.