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- Convenors:
-
Kristine Alexander
(The University of Lethbridge)
Harald Fischer-Tine (ETH Zurich)
- Location:
- Room 111
- Start time:
- 30 July, 2016 at
Time zone: Europe/Warsaw
- Session slots:
- 2
Short Abstract:
This panel will shed new light on the ways in which multiple, sometimes competing ideologies and groups sought to mobilize young people across twentieth-century South Asia.
Long Abstract:
Throughout the twentieth century, the idea of "youth" signified or was associated with energy, vigour, and the potential for modernization or "national renewal". Hence, there were hence manifold efforts to win over young people for projects of social reform, anti-colonial agitation and post-independence nation-building. However, in South Asia and beyond, youth were also seen as malleable and impulsive and therefore in need of disciplining to keep their possibly destructive energies in harness. Engaging with international scholarship on age as a category of analysis, this panel will examine a broad array of attempts to mobilize, organize, and strengthen youth in colonial and post-colonial South Asia. Papers by confirmed contributors will explore a number of movements and organizations, including: the YMCA (Fischer-Tiné) the Girl Guide movement (Alexander), the youth organization of the Indian National Congress (Roy), formal education (Topdar), and The Bharat Sevak Samaj (Watt). We hope to further broaden the perspective through the call for papers.
The following scholars have already confirmed their participation in case our panel is accepted by the organisers:
Kristine Alexander (University of Lethbridge)
Harald Fischer-Tiné (ETH-Zurich)
Franziska Roy (ZMO, Berlin)
Sudipa Topdar (Illinois State University)
Carey Watt (University of Fredericton, NB)
Accepted papers:
Session 1Michael Philipp Brunner (ETH Zurich)
Paper short abstract:
This paper looks at ideals and codes of conduct conveyed through sports and physical education at Khalsa College, Amritsar, to transform the Sikh youth into loyal and masculine citizens as imagined by the various Sikh fractions as well as the civil and military authorities in late colonial India.
Paper long abstract:
Khalsa College was founded in 1892 and was the first college aiming to impart English education specifically to boys and young men from the Sikh community. In the economically, politically and socio-religiously rapidly transforming Punjab of late 19th/early 20th century activists and reformers of neo-Sikh (Tat Khalsa) organizations saw themselves leading a necessary project for the renewal of a degenerated Sikh faith. Education was a crucial part of their programs. Khalsa College, as is one of the premises of this paper, thus became a central site for the negotiation and contestation of the various ideas about the right education and socialization of the Sikh youth.
An interesting aspect of this process is the role physical education, discipline and competitive sports played on the campus. The paper thus asks how concepts of Sikh masculinity and martiality, nurtured by the warrior ethos of the Sikh Khalsa order as well as orientalist and racial stereotyping, were central in discussions about the college's objective of moulding Punjabi youth to loyal, intelligent citizens (and Sikhs) and how these images were constructed especially relationally through e.g. intercollegiate games, history or religious instruction. The paper enquires the persistence of a Victorian and Edwardian games ethic at the college, contested by new national and international discourses and schemes of physical education emerging during the interwar period, and considers the strong relationship of the institution to the military authorities as well as the influence of the Sikh princely states and the military and landowner classes.
Harald Fischer-Tine (ETH Zurich)
Paper short abstract:
Focusing on the establishment of a college for physical education and a training centre for rural elites, the paper explores the crucial role of the US-dominated Young Men’s Christian Association in India in devising youth empowerment schemes from the 1920s to the 1940s
Paper long abstract:
The Young Men's Christian Association (Y.M.C.A.) appeared in the Indian sub-continent as early as 1857, but the organisation only became a significant player after 1890, when the presence of American "secretaries" (missionaries) and the flow of US capital thoroughly transformed its modus operandi. After a period of intense interaction with the colonial government, the 'Y' moved closer to the Indian National Congress after the end of WW I. Simultaneously the emphasis of its activities shifted increasingly from religious instruction and proselytisation to social and philanthropic work.
The talk examines two of the YMCA's ventures in 'leadership training' that were designed to prepare a small elite segment of South Asia's youth for their future role after the foreseeable end of the British Empire in South Asia. The first case study is on a College of Physical Education inaugurated in Madras the second a rural training centre opened in Martandam (in today's Kerala) a few years later.
Looking at these educational institutions, the YMCA's specific understanding of youth and its tasks is put under scrutiny while at the same time questions about the ideological and practical entanglements with colonial ideologies and agendas are addressed.
Kristine Alexander (The University of Lethbridge)
Paper short abstract:
Foregrounding age and gender as categories of analysis, this paper examines the Girl Guide movement’s attempts to mobilize girlhood for sometimes contested ends in late colonial and postcolonial India.
Paper long abstract:
Geraldine Forbes's 1996 book Women in Modern India includes a photograph a group of Indian Girl Guides wearing saris, accompanied by the caption "In Training to Join Gandhi: Bharat Scouts, Allahabad, 1929." This image, which raises many questions about the place of girls and organized youth movements in late colonial India, is not discussed in any detail in Forbes' text. My paper will begin to answer some of these questions by discussing the Guide movement in India between the 1920s and 1960s. Foregrounding age and gender as categories of analysis, the paper uses periodicals and records from various Guide archives and the All-India Women's Conference to better understand the movement's sometimes contested vision of citizenship, physical culture, and national/international girlhood. Tracing the shifts that took place before and after Independence, the talk will end with a discussion of Sangam, the global Girl Guide hostel that was opened in Pune in 1966.
Sugata Nandi (West Bengal State University, Kolkata, India)
Paper short abstract:
The Muslim National Guards, quasi military youth wing of Muslim League, played a violent and vital role in Pakistan movement in Calcutta during 1942-47. This paper studies how it mobilized a large section of educated Muslim youth of the city to attain Pakistan using violence .
Paper long abstract:
This paper studies the Muslim National Guards (MNG) and its role in the politics of Partition as witnessed in Calcutta. The MNG was founded by Jinnah in 1942 as a youth organization of the Muslim League (ML). The Bengal Provincial MNG was headquartered in Calcutta and it was headed by Hussein Shahid Suhrawardy, the unrivalled mass leader among ML politicians in Bengal. He popularized the organization with the help of Abul Hashim, a socialist among Leaguers. The MNG indoctrinated Muslim students and youths for attainment of Pakistan and provided them with rudimentary military training. By 1943 it emerged as an association of young Pakistan movement activists in Calcutta. Two institutions, Calcutta Islamia College and Becker hostel, became nerve centres of its political activity. From the time of Direct Action Day which became occasion for outbreak of the first Partition riot in Calcutta on August 16, 1946 the MNG played a pivotal role in the violent campaign for Pakistan in the city. First as an arm of the ML to bring about the riot of August 1946 and then as a quasi-military instrument of routine intimidation and coercion till mid 1947 the MNG enjoyed decisive importance in city politics during the last year of the Raj. Examining its brief history I enquire how Pakistan turned into the sole rallying point for a large section of the educated Muslim youth of Calcutta and how they were mobilized to use violence to accomplish a political objective.
Franziska Roy (Zentrum Moderner Orient)
Paper short abstract:
The paper deals with the Congress-affiliated youth organisations, particularly their international relations and nation-building aspirations during the Cold War.
Paper long abstract:
The paper looks at the youth department organisation of the Indian National Congress from the 1950 to the early 1970s. It aims to make productive the tensions between the Non-Alignment paradigm, the actual international contacts of actors within the youth department who assumed the role of bona fide cultuural ambassadors, and the nation-building agenda at home. To this end, the networks and some of the relevant actors within the youth department and their agenda(s) will be traced and put in the larger context of the internal struggles and attempts at re-organisation of the Congress organisation on the one hand, and the difficult balance India had to maintain in the international sphere on the other.