Unfamiliar Relations

Unfamiliar Relations restores the family and its many forms and meanings to a central place in the history of South Asia between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. In her incisive introduction, Indrani Chatterjee argues that the recent wealth of scholarship on ethnicity, sexuality, gender, imperialism, and patriarchy in South Asia during the colonial period often overlooks careful historical analysis of the highly contested concept of family. Together, these essays demolish family as an abstract concept in South Asian colonial history, demonstrating its exceedingly different meanings across temporal and geographical space. The scholarship in this volume reveals a far more complex set of dynamics than a simple binary between indigenous and colonial forms and structures. It approaches this study from the pre-colonial period on, rather than backwards as has been the case with previous scholarship. Topics include a British colonial officer who married a Mughal noblewoman and converted to Islam around the turn of the nineteenth century, the role gossip and taboo play in the formation of Indian family history, and a look at social relations in the penal colony on the Andaman Islands. The primary audience for the book will be South Asianists, but the volume's innovative theoretical and historiographic treatment of this topic will make it of interest to scholars of the family, gender, and colonialism.