1 00:00:00,060 --> 00:00:02,220 Welcome. Deeper and deeper. 2 00:00:02,220 --> 00:00:16,830 Our last speaker from Lively Symptom Moderne, an audience from Germany, and her talk will be on the journey and religious conversion. 3 00:00:16,830 --> 00:00:20,990 Please. Thank you, ED. 4 00:00:20,990 --> 00:00:33,530 I also want to thank the organisers for adjusting my paper, and I hope my paper is not an anticlimax as long as people have the confidence. 5 00:00:33,530 --> 00:00:45,500 So I just started and I first watched the movie Gandhi in 1982, though I had little comprehension of politics at the time of India as a huge category. 6 00:00:45,500 --> 00:00:49,580 As such, I learnt something important from the film. 7 00:00:49,580 --> 00:00:56,150 This was that people, especially those who wanted to become community leaders at the first, travel through that very countryside. 8 00:00:56,150 --> 00:01:01,790 They wanted to represent as leaders and amongst whom they wanted to be recognised as leaders. 9 00:01:01,790 --> 00:01:06,470 This was not just another professional journey, but a person. What an outsider, 10 00:01:06,470 --> 00:01:12,140 traveller photo leader had to first give himself to the region and community in ways that 11 00:01:12,140 --> 00:01:18,470 made him hyper visible as a representative of those who were unseen and hence suffering. 12 00:01:18,470 --> 00:01:23,900 Such a journey required him to straddle the category that he was creating from its margins, 13 00:01:23,900 --> 00:01:30,350 recreating it in his own image and recreating himself in turn in its image. 14 00:01:30,350 --> 00:01:38,210 These boundary lines, or margins characterising that meeting place between perceived and discursive identities of the inside and the outside, 15 00:01:38,210 --> 00:01:43,400 therefore also acted as fields of influence and powerful an earpiece. 16 00:01:43,400 --> 00:01:49,490 Gandhi himself travelled with many insiders and outsiders to embody that boundary in his own 17 00:01:49,490 --> 00:01:55,860 personhood that produced a heuristic territory and community that he aspired to lead is vibe, 18 00:01:55,860 --> 00:02:01,700 symbolising that insight about his friend, a British journalist and missionary, symbolising the other outside. 19 00:02:01,700 --> 00:02:09,590 But most importantly, Gandhi travelled with the poor and was fully visible to them, who then showed and taught him about their poverty, 20 00:02:09,590 --> 00:02:16,010 and also Gandhi imbibed as part of their collective journey to making a place and people led by him. 21 00:02:16,010 --> 00:02:24,970 But my paper today is not about Gandhi. This period is only meant to communicate the many similarities I felt existed between Bubba Pulmonary, 22 00:02:24,970 --> 00:02:30,250 a Christian reformer from 19th century, won the presidency and the Gandhi of the film. 23 00:02:30,250 --> 00:02:36,760 I kept returning to scenes of the film in my mind throughout the six years I spent engaging with but Menzies writings. 24 00:02:36,760 --> 00:02:45,340 For example, it always amazed me to read, but Menzies heartrending stories about the widows, their suffering and their sexual frustration. 25 00:02:45,340 --> 00:02:49,810 I always wondered, would those who read these stories already know this? 26 00:02:49,810 --> 00:02:54,220 So for whom to spend money writing? And what was his audience? 27 00:02:54,220 --> 00:03:00,490 Also, why would his book offend others in the way it did if they already knew all this? 28 00:03:00,490 --> 00:03:09,610 And one of them faced fierce backlash from Hindus and was denounced as shameful, obscene and a disgusting novel about the sexuality of widows? 29 00:03:09,610 --> 00:03:16,470 There are also calls to not recognise the religion as the first vernacular novel in India and in Britain. 30 00:03:16,470 --> 00:03:21,360 Look, Christianity is hardly mentioned in the book, conversion is implicit in every book, every word. 31 00:03:21,360 --> 00:03:29,130 But Manji writes in Yemen up, this conversion was at a scale far more fundamental than but his desire that's suffering 32 00:03:29,130 --> 00:03:35,310 Marathi windows accept Jesus Christ as the saviour and remarry converts like himself. 33 00:03:35,310 --> 00:03:41,130 But when she was writing off the conversion process that she embedded in the act of circulation itself, 34 00:03:41,130 --> 00:03:48,570 involved in the journeying of a territory that would yield leadership to the journey, the journey would lead to the discursive, 35 00:03:48,570 --> 00:03:53,790 formulaic transformation and reformulation of a territory that was travelled through, 36 00:03:53,790 --> 00:03:58,020 binding it together with the traveller in a dynamic process of leadership and 37 00:03:58,020 --> 00:04:03,560 person making that simultaneously involved placemaking and morality making. 38 00:04:03,560 --> 00:04:06,410 Yemen, not in Yemen, not by Jordan, was unlike most women, 39 00:04:06,410 --> 00:04:13,070 oftentimes in so far that young and newly married women hardly undertook extensive road trips along with their husbands, 40 00:04:13,070 --> 00:04:17,530 apart from a few male servants across the length and breadth of the decade. 41 00:04:17,530 --> 00:04:25,520 David Hadley also women's rights activists in 1857. But yet not all conventions were broken, though Yemen. 42 00:04:25,520 --> 00:04:28,460 I was a married woman accompanying her husband. 43 00:04:28,460 --> 00:04:37,370 So an individualistic relationship for him, unmediated by family and local community, constituted a new paradigm of marital punctuality. 44 00:04:37,370 --> 00:04:46,550 That, and she was more than just above the Yamina, empathised with an almost experience the pain and frustration of the myriad widows she met. 45 00:04:46,550 --> 00:04:51,620 She did not emerge. She did not merge with them entirely. Being an educated woman. 46 00:04:51,620 --> 00:04:57,020 And moreover, as she herself said in the book Christian at Heart. 47 00:04:57,020 --> 00:05:03,530 But not baptised till the very end. Yemen says became a third space, 48 00:05:03,530 --> 00:05:09,770 a boundary that commented upon image or rather like a conduit streamed in stories of masses 49 00:05:09,770 --> 00:05:15,020 of unseen and unheard those who spoke to her and threw her in the book's dialogues, 50 00:05:15,020 --> 00:05:24,050 making themselves visible to readers. This produced a passive personality for the Marathi place for Category India monopoly, 51 00:05:24,050 --> 00:05:29,330 often not as an historical region of Kings Dynasty saints and poets, 52 00:05:29,330 --> 00:05:34,640 but as a region of poor, abandoned, suffering, abused and sexually frustrated widows. 53 00:05:34,640 --> 00:05:39,290 Not a place of cultural grandeur connected to the Mesrata Empire, 54 00:05:39,290 --> 00:05:45,800 but a place where young widows secretly aborted their unborn foetuses and buried them and were caught out, 55 00:05:45,800 --> 00:05:50,980 for whom abortions by the caked blood found streaking their inner thighs. 56 00:05:50,980 --> 00:06:00,790 But Maggi produced Maharashtra anew as an activist category, a united conglomerate of universally and uniformly suffering Hindu widows, 57 00:06:00,790 --> 00:06:09,760 and this activist production of place and identity made Yamuna admins use protagonist and alter ego their saviour and leader, 58 00:06:09,760 --> 00:06:12,520 while her ready to be baptised finished by the end, 59 00:06:12,520 --> 00:06:20,500 conveniently rid her of her own sexual frustration and through that upheld social morality because she was herself a widow. 60 00:06:20,500 --> 00:06:27,790 By then, her remarriage after widowhood also made her the role model of the various widows she met in the book. 61 00:06:27,790 --> 00:06:34,620 Therefore, but Yamina was also part Manges fantasy image of a perfect convert bride. 62 00:06:34,620 --> 00:06:38,340 And this brings us to the question of optics, personal equality, 63 00:06:38,340 --> 00:06:45,540 the writing of Yemen very often was contextualised in Parliament, his own divorce in 1857 1856. 64 00:06:45,540 --> 00:06:51,390 Sorry, that had resulted from his wife's family pressuring her to reject a convert to husband, 65 00:06:51,390 --> 00:06:56,310 and he often lamented that she would henceforth have to live the life of a widow. 66 00:06:56,310 --> 00:07:03,540 She did try to return to him two or three years after their divorce, but he had already remade it by then, 67 00:07:03,540 --> 00:07:11,100 but she hardly started from scratch in this venture of placemaking or in his task of dating, 68 00:07:11,100 --> 00:07:19,140 but at his best as a defined place and who to stick category, there was a robust intellectual genealogy of placemaking that came before him. 69 00:07:19,140 --> 00:07:26,640 But it was the audience that mattered most an audience that would readily recognise and accept the category that was being made. 70 00:07:26,640 --> 00:07:33,690 Therefore, who made this category was also important for recognising a category from the outside also hinged on how much of this 71 00:07:33,690 --> 00:07:41,340 outside the place maker was himself implicated in and how much respect it received in his relationship with that outside. 72 00:07:41,340 --> 00:07:47,090 Therefore, I ponder on the special interventionist role of firebrand community leaders like Manji, 73 00:07:47,090 --> 00:07:55,980 who embodied the margins of Hindu society to recreate morality plays as a soulful, angry and oppressed category of adults. 74 00:07:55,980 --> 00:08:03,870 But Major ingeniously used aggrieved narratives of victimisation that produced a uniform and universal image that clamour for new leadership, 75 00:08:03,870 --> 00:08:09,450 his leadership. This new audience that Batman was deeply respected was, of course, 76 00:08:09,450 --> 00:08:14,490 the European mission to defeat Scottish and English missionaries in the reformers 77 00:08:14,490 --> 00:08:17,820 and those other than those who were educated in missionary institutions. 78 00:08:17,820 --> 00:08:28,090 But when neither Christian nor reformers, given the popularity and discussion that had been generated, this was a large field in the 19th century. 79 00:08:28,090 --> 00:08:34,470 But she did not have to look wired up to the bogey of suffering either. Well, both men and women of a Christian convert step, 80 00:08:34,470 --> 00:08:40,750 but also no doubt there was also no doubt that both Manji and Yamuna were also upper caste Hindus, 81 00:08:40,750 --> 00:08:47,020 their marginal location from their already given class and class status, imbuing them with tremendous power. 82 00:08:47,020 --> 00:08:55,450 This boundary identity was wonderfully exemplified in the title of Bud Menzies autobiography from 1889, once a Hindu, now a Christian. 83 00:08:55,450 --> 00:09:00,940 But then she proudly bore the wound of his truncated Hindu self, truncated at his baptism. 84 00:09:00,940 --> 00:09:07,090 That is like a badge of honour that simultaneously acted as the trace of his Hindu past that 85 00:09:07,090 --> 00:09:12,730 he constantly wrote about in order to distance it from the Christian side of his boundary. 86 00:09:12,730 --> 00:09:21,230 And his writings were extraordinarily threatening if one were to measure the anger you to see just evidence of how successful his own betrayal was. 87 00:09:21,230 --> 00:09:24,500 But mention, moreover and drug shaming and humiliating Hindus, 88 00:09:24,500 --> 00:09:33,440 and through this shaming successfully undermined his own truncated Hindu self that was omnipresent like a dangerous spectre in all his writings. 89 00:09:33,440 --> 00:09:39,020 He also heaped a good bit of this shame on the widows of young, who, despite being pathetic victims, 90 00:09:39,020 --> 00:09:46,580 were also depicted as shamelessly debased beings who atavistic only allowed themselves to be exploited. 91 00:09:46,580 --> 00:09:50,570 He wrote of them as an un-American female boss, 92 00:09:50,570 --> 00:09:56,600 living their lives as animals in pain with no idea of education and with no idea of the captivity that 93 00:09:56,600 --> 00:10:02,660 was being formed by Ferdinand and Yamina and the activist agenda of the remarriage applied to it. 94 00:10:02,660 --> 00:10:04,640 But then she, therefore unlike Gandhi, 95 00:10:04,640 --> 00:10:11,900 did not need companions who could be filled with this leadership persona in his journey to the Marathi speaking zone of widowhood. 96 00:10:11,900 --> 00:10:21,640 That Yamuna traversed Yamuna as his own Hindu and try to convert past his perfect fantasy bride was always present by his side. 97 00:10:21,640 --> 00:10:28,230 Yemen operation was special for many reasons. Not only was it the first novel ever written in India, 98 00:10:28,230 --> 00:10:36,390 but it was also frequently written in the 1857 a year emblazoned in the nationalist historiography of India for other reasons. 99 00:10:36,390 --> 00:10:41,460 But Yemen also produced the Marathi place in a starkly different light of Hindus being 100 00:10:41,460 --> 00:10:47,470 in the Bill of Independence for the adamantly refused to free their own videos. 101 00:10:47,470 --> 00:10:52,350 Yamina Britain entered the market in the wake of the 1856 vetoed the Marriage Act, 102 00:10:52,350 --> 00:10:57,150 a central feature in the novel Social Ecology that saw the emergence of reformers 103 00:10:57,150 --> 00:11:02,760 like each of a in Bengal championed and supported for what you consider 104 00:11:02,760 --> 00:11:11,340 to be the latter's recognition of Hindu society as a place that was not free enough from within and hence unprepared to be independent from the doubt. 105 00:11:11,340 --> 00:11:15,990 Neither of us but major feminist, though that question is itself teleological. 106 00:11:15,990 --> 00:11:21,720 He did, however, present then as a woman centric three guys claiming to support women in the mention 107 00:11:21,720 --> 00:11:27,360 of education equality within that ideal conjugal relationships and indeed remarriage. 108 00:11:27,360 --> 00:11:32,580 But just because men she supported believe marriage did not mean that he supported women or riddles. 109 00:11:32,580 --> 00:11:41,220 He also looked down upon them for their alleged promiscuity that, he said, would bring down bring about the downfall of society and their own souls. 110 00:11:41,220 --> 00:11:48,210 You denounced dancers, women, entertainers or commercial artists, and sympathy for prostitutes was beyond him. 111 00:11:48,210 --> 00:11:53,120 Unless these women were forced, terribly unfortunate victims first. 112 00:11:53,120 --> 00:11:57,500 But the quintessential Protestant was mostly interested in the moral reform of 113 00:11:57,500 --> 00:12:02,270 Hindu society that would contain sexuality within the confines of marriage, 114 00:12:02,270 --> 00:12:05,630 something that you would not invite but independence, education, 115 00:12:05,630 --> 00:12:11,300 spiritual development and social activism blossoming only in the shadows that has been so 116 00:12:11,300 --> 00:12:16,040 long wasn't that important for black men in this novel that's so deeply discussed marriage, 117 00:12:16,040 --> 00:12:19,040 sex and morality for women. 118 00:12:19,040 --> 00:12:26,150 But mentally would not, for example, have supported a conservative Hindu wife who rebelled against a reformist Christian husband. 119 00:12:26,150 --> 00:12:33,890 He could not accept his own wives the decision to divorce him and insisted that she was negatively influenced by her father. 120 00:12:33,890 --> 00:12:42,110 We don't have a voice. But her so-called return to him two or three years after the divorce must have indicated a lot. 121 00:12:42,110 --> 00:12:50,420 But when she's building, manage agenda was not entirely shared with the Typekit outrage about the destitution of girl children as widows, either. 122 00:12:50,420 --> 00:12:54,350 But Manji was more belligerent concern, mostly and rather gleefully, 123 00:12:54,350 --> 00:13:00,920 with exposing Hindus, accusing the fight as a masquerade of thinly veiled immorality. 124 00:13:00,920 --> 00:13:07,550 An important protagonist of this novel, for example, a woman without a name and simply referred to as Chevron, 125 00:13:07,550 --> 00:13:16,340 his mother is a victimised sex worker in the Hindu pilgrimage town of West Kashi and then dodges sexually exploited by Temple Priest. 126 00:13:16,340 --> 00:13:24,220 She's also predictably complicit. Yemen schools children's mother joined the only conclusion possible in a book that so defiant, 127 00:13:24,220 --> 00:13:31,460 but Benji's Protestant limits a mandate that women would not be given to in conductivity remote. 128 00:13:31,460 --> 00:13:39,350 Producing that ideal sex as a duty in this case for both men and women up to the task of reducing social immorality. 129 00:13:39,350 --> 00:13:47,190 The second conclusion? Unsurprisingly, given bad mortgages, bad news for social reform, groups of histones, first, 130 00:13:47,190 --> 00:13:57,240 the parents really and then the product inasmuch was that widows suffered due to ineffectual Hindu social reformers who promised to uplift them, 131 00:13:57,240 --> 00:14:04,080 but did not do so because of their own affective attachment to a Hindu family, community and social networks. 132 00:14:04,080 --> 00:14:10,440 Hence, betrayed by Hindu reformers, women like chevrons mother who has a long diatribe in the book of Gains, look ahead. 133 00:14:10,440 --> 00:14:14,100 Nobody had no choice but to turn to prostitution. 134 00:14:14,100 --> 00:14:22,580 But when she came close to accusing social reformers of creating prostitution as if they were creating it through their false promises. 135 00:14:22,580 --> 00:14:26,420 You want the money to be spent five minutes? 136 00:14:26,420 --> 00:14:35,060 Yes, thank you. Nigel Yemen admitted to closing the life chapter of a grand love story with her first 137 00:14:35,060 --> 00:14:40,070 husband and the unique for the Times conjugal relationship she shared with him. 138 00:14:40,070 --> 00:14:47,030 It's really difficult namadi, because preserving social morality was more important than her emotions and memories. 139 00:14:47,030 --> 00:14:53,240 I will conclude here by saying that Yemen's president repeatedly poses the question of a journey and the 140 00:14:53,240 --> 00:15:01,880 formation of spaces as places and categories that reconstructed as universal and decent components that we did, 141 00:15:01,880 --> 00:15:04,640 but Menzies leadership. 142 00:15:04,640 --> 00:15:14,000 The novel produces the Marathi place as outside of history and culture and as a amid territorial region that was instead ranked with moral corruption, 143 00:15:14,000 --> 00:15:18,830 cowardice, treachery, sin, promiscuity, suffering and bondage. 144 00:15:18,830 --> 00:15:22,880 Many would reduce admin dependence from the pages of Yemen OP. 145 00:15:22,880 --> 00:15:28,010 Otherwise, there would be nothing left to do. Once they renovate to the next cantonment or temple down, 146 00:15:28,010 --> 00:15:36,290 like the many videos of beer got his home his hometown to grow out their hair and chalk jewels to become prostitutes, 147 00:15:36,290 --> 00:15:41,990 concubines and mistresses of either British soldiers or Hindu peace, their souls destroyed forever. 148 00:15:41,990 --> 00:15:46,190 But Monday's Maharashtrian 1857 mosque by the widow remained intact, 149 00:15:46,190 --> 00:15:54,440 and his own double was hence the component that teetered on the brink of an abyss that was populated by fatherless sons. 150 00:15:54,440 --> 00:15:56,181 Thank you.