ISSN (Print) - 0012-9976 | ISSN (Online) - 2349-8846

Articles by Nita KumarSubscribe to Nita Kumar

The Weavers of Banaras

A switch from the handloom to the powerloom has altered the livelihood, ethos, and lifestyle of the weavers of the Banaras silk industry. This article is an attempt to understand how these artisans have coped with the transformation wrought by technology, how they perceive changes occurring in Banaras’s composite culture, and their reactions to the current political dispensation led by Narendra Modi.

A Postcolonial School in a Modern World

This essay is about a school, taken not only as an educational project, but as an active historical intervention. A discussion of the school helps us to interpret the history of education, and perhaps all history, with new insight; to understand the nature of modernity in a provincial city; and to fashion an approach to both theory and practice that could be called postcolonial.

Widows, Education and Social Change in Twentieth Century Banaras

in Twentieth Century Banaras Nita Kumar In the first half of this century, some one dozen women in Banaras played key rotes in channelling the educational movement into new directions, expanding its agenda to include girls, especially poor girls. These women stand out as pioneering in that they founded schools, dynamic in the way they administered and expanded them, and radical in the vision they had for their students. What makes the case of these women particularly interesting is that they were mostly widows. They rejected the familiar stereotypes for widows through their activism, but in subtle ways that retained for them the respect of society Through the manipulation of symbols, they attained the position of 'devis', Other women of the time, from before then, and right up to the present, who are active in education

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