Welcome. Deeper and deeper.
Our last speaker from Lively Symptom Moderne, an audience from Germany, and her talk will be on the journey and religious conversion.
Please. Thank you, ED.
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.
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.
As such, I learnt something important from the film.
This was that people, especially those who wanted to become community leaders at the first, travel through that very countryside.
They wanted to represent as leaders and amongst whom they wanted to be recognised as leaders.
This was not just another professional journey, but a person. What an outsider,
traveller photo leader had to first give himself to the region and community in ways that
made him hyper visible as a representative of those who were unseen and hence suffering.
Such a journey required him to straddle the category that he was creating from its margins,
recreating it in his own image and recreating himself in turn in its image.
These boundary lines, or margins characterising that meeting place between perceived and discursive identities of the inside and the outside,
therefore also acted as fields of influence and powerful an earpiece.
Gandhi himself travelled with many insiders and outsiders to embody that boundary in his own
personhood that produced a heuristic territory and community that he aspired to lead is vibe,
symbolising that insight about his friend, a British journalist and missionary, symbolising the other outside.
But most importantly, Gandhi travelled with the poor and was fully visible to them, who then showed and taught him about their poverty,
and also Gandhi imbibed as part of their collective journey to making a place and people led by him.
But my paper today is not about Gandhi. This period is only meant to communicate the many similarities I felt existed between Bubba Pulmonary,
a Christian reformer from 19th century, won the presidency and the Gandhi of the film.
I kept returning to scenes of the film in my mind throughout the six years I spent engaging with but Menzies writings.
For example, it always amazed me to read, but Menzies heartrending stories about the widows, their suffering and their sexual frustration.
I always wondered, would those who read these stories already know this?
So for whom to spend money writing? And what was his audience?
Also, why would his book offend others in the way it did if they already knew all this?
And one of them faced fierce backlash from Hindus and was denounced as shameful, obscene and a disgusting novel about the sexuality of widows?
There are also calls to not recognise the religion as the first vernacular novel in India and in Britain.
Look, Christianity is hardly mentioned in the book, conversion is implicit in every book, every word.
But Manji writes in Yemen up, this conversion was at a scale far more fundamental than but his desire that's suffering
Marathi windows accept Jesus Christ as the saviour and remarry converts like himself.
But when she was writing off the conversion process that she embedded in the act of circulation itself,
involved in the journeying of a territory that would yield leadership to the journey, the journey would lead to the discursive,
formulaic transformation and reformulation of a territory that was travelled through,
binding it together with the traveller in a dynamic process of leadership and
person making that simultaneously involved placemaking and morality making.
Yemen, not in Yemen, not by Jordan, was unlike most women,
oftentimes in so far that young and newly married women hardly undertook extensive road trips along with their husbands,
apart from a few male servants across the length and breadth of the decade.
David Hadley also women's rights activists in 1857. But yet not all conventions were broken, though Yemen.
I was a married woman accompanying her husband.
So an individualistic relationship for him, unmediated by family and local community, constituted a new paradigm of marital punctuality.
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.
She did not emerge. She did not merge with them entirely. Being an educated woman.
And moreover, as she herself said in the book Christian at Heart.
But not baptised till the very end. Yemen says became a third space,
a boundary that commented upon image or rather like a conduit streamed in stories of masses
of unseen and unheard those who spoke to her and threw her in the book's dialogues,
making themselves visible to readers. This produced a passive personality for the Marathi place for Category India monopoly,
often not as an historical region of Kings Dynasty saints and poets,
but as a region of poor, abandoned, suffering, abused and sexually frustrated widows.
Not a place of cultural grandeur connected to the Mesrata Empire,
but a place where young widows secretly aborted their unborn foetuses and buried them and were caught out,
for whom abortions by the caked blood found streaking their inner thighs.
But Maggi produced Maharashtra anew as an activist category, a united conglomerate of universally and uniformly suffering Hindu widows,
and this activist production of place and identity made Yamuna admins use protagonist and alter ego their saviour and leader,
while her ready to be baptised finished by the end,
conveniently rid her of her own sexual frustration and through that upheld social morality because she was herself a widow.
By then, her remarriage after widowhood also made her the role model of the various widows she met in the book.
Therefore, but Yamina was also part Manges fantasy image of a perfect convert bride.
And this brings us to the question of optics, personal equality,
the writing of Yemen very often was contextualised in Parliament, his own divorce in 1857 1856.
Sorry, that had resulted from his wife's family pressuring her to reject a convert to husband,
and he often lamented that she would henceforth have to live the life of a widow.
She did try to return to him two or three years after their divorce, but he had already remade it by then,
but she hardly started from scratch in this venture of placemaking or in his task of dating,
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.
But it was the audience that mattered most an audience that would readily recognise and accept the category that was being made.
Therefore, who made this category was also important for recognising a category from the outside also hinged on how much of this
outside the place maker was himself implicated in and how much respect it received in his relationship with that outside.
Therefore, I ponder on the special interventionist role of firebrand community leaders like Manji,
who embodied the margins of Hindu society to recreate morality plays as a soulful, angry and oppressed category of adults.
But Major ingeniously used aggrieved narratives of victimisation that produced a uniform and universal image that clamour for new leadership,
his leadership. This new audience that Batman was deeply respected was, of course,
the European mission to defeat Scottish and English missionaries in the reformers
and those other than those who were educated in missionary institutions.
But when neither Christian nor reformers, given the popularity and discussion that had been generated, this was a large field in the 19th century.
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,
but also no doubt there was also no doubt that both Manji and Yamuna were also upper caste Hindus,
their marginal location from their already given class and class status, imbuing them with tremendous power.
This boundary identity was wonderfully exemplified in the title of Bud Menzies autobiography from 1889, once a Hindu, now a Christian.
But then she proudly bore the wound of his truncated Hindu self, truncated at his baptism.
That is like a badge of honour that simultaneously acted as the trace of his Hindu past that
he constantly wrote about in order to distance it from the Christian side of his boundary.
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.
But mention, moreover and drug shaming and humiliating Hindus,
and through this shaming successfully undermined his own truncated Hindu self that was omnipresent like a dangerous spectre in all his writings.
He also heaped a good bit of this shame on the widows of young, who, despite being pathetic victims,
were also depicted as shamelessly debased beings who atavistic only allowed themselves to be exploited.
He wrote of them as an un-American female boss,
living their lives as animals in pain with no idea of education and with no idea of the captivity that
was being formed by Ferdinand and Yamina and the activist agenda of the remarriage applied to it.
But then she, therefore unlike Gandhi,
did not need companions who could be filled with this leadership persona in his journey to the Marathi speaking zone of widowhood.
That Yamuna traversed Yamuna as his own Hindu and try to convert past his perfect fantasy bride was always present by his side.
Yemen operation was special for many reasons. Not only was it the first novel ever written in India,
but it was also frequently written in the 1857 a year emblazoned in the nationalist historiography of India for other reasons.
But Yemen also produced the Marathi place in a starkly different light of Hindus being
in the Bill of Independence for the adamantly refused to free their own videos.
Yamina Britain entered the market in the wake of the 1856 vetoed the Marriage Act,
a central feature in the novel Social Ecology that saw the emergence of reformers
like each of a in Bengal championed and supported for what you consider
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.
Neither of us but major feminist, though that question is itself teleological.
He did, however, present then as a woman centric three guys claiming to support women in the mention
of education equality within that ideal conjugal relationships and indeed remarriage.
But just because men she supported believe marriage did not mean that he supported women or riddles.
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.
You denounced dancers, women, entertainers or commercial artists, and sympathy for prostitutes was beyond him.
Unless these women were forced, terribly unfortunate victims first.
But the quintessential Protestant was mostly interested in the moral reform of
Hindu society that would contain sexuality within the confines of marriage,
something that you would not invite but independence, education,
spiritual development and social activism blossoming only in the shadows that has been so
long wasn't that important for black men in this novel that's so deeply discussed marriage,
sex and morality for women.
But mentally would not, for example, have supported a conservative Hindu wife who rebelled against a reformist Christian husband.
He could not accept his own wives the decision to divorce him and insisted that she was negatively influenced by her father.
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.
But when she's building, manage agenda was not entirely shared with the Typekit outrage about the destitution of girl children as widows, either.
But Manji was more belligerent concern, mostly and rather gleefully,
with exposing Hindus, accusing the fight as a masquerade of thinly veiled immorality.
An important protagonist of this novel, for example, a woman without a name and simply referred to as Chevron,
his mother is a victimised sex worker in the Hindu pilgrimage town of West Kashi and then dodges sexually exploited by Temple Priest.
She's also predictably complicit. Yemen schools children's mother joined the only conclusion possible in a book that so defiant,
but Benji's Protestant limits a mandate that women would not be given to in conductivity remote.
Producing that ideal sex as a duty in this case for both men and women up to the task of reducing social immorality.
The second conclusion? Unsurprisingly, given bad mortgages, bad news for social reform, groups of histones, first,
the parents really and then the product inasmuch was that widows suffered due to ineffectual Hindu social reformers who promised to uplift them,
but did not do so because of their own affective attachment to a Hindu family, community and social networks.
Hence, betrayed by Hindu reformers, women like chevrons mother who has a long diatribe in the book of Gains, look ahead.
Nobody had no choice but to turn to prostitution.
But when she came close to accusing social reformers of creating prostitution as if they were creating it through their false promises.
You want the money to be spent five minutes?
Yes, thank you. Nigel Yemen admitted to closing the life chapter of a grand love story with her first
husband and the unique for the Times conjugal relationship she shared with him.
It's really difficult namadi, because preserving social morality was more important than her emotions and memories.
I will conclude here by saying that Yemen's president repeatedly poses the question of a journey and the
formation of spaces as places and categories that reconstructed as universal and decent components that we did,
but Menzies leadership.
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,
cowardice, treachery, sin, promiscuity, suffering and bondage.
Many would reduce admin dependence from the pages of Yemen OP.
Otherwise, there would be nothing left to do. Once they renovate to the next cantonment or temple down,
like the many videos of beer got his home his hometown to grow out their hair and chalk jewels to become prostitutes,
concubines and mistresses of either British soldiers or Hindu peace, their souls destroyed forever.
But Monday's Maharashtrian 1857 mosque by the widow remained intact,
and his own double was hence the component that teetered on the brink of an abyss that was populated by fatherless sons.
Thank you.