Gender and History in Modern South Asia Research Paper

Gender and History in Modern South Asia - Research Paper Example Mani states that one of the reasons that the colonial government abolished the right known as sati was as a result of the belief that it was an inhuman practice that did not put into consideration the rights of the women who underwent it.1 Colonial officials believed that sati was done because the family of women’s husbands did not wish to be saddled with the upkeep of widows. Furthermore, it was believed that these families did not wish widows to contest their husbands’ estates and this was a reason why they were coerced to undergo the right. The result was that the colonial government came to believe that the women who underwent sati were coerced to do so by greedy relatives and members of the Brahmin caste who were called upon to officiate the occasion. Colonial officials wished to institute laws that were designed to ensure that women were protected against what they saw as the depravity of the whole practice of sati, hence the move to abolish it. However, contempor ary scholarship shows that despite there being some cases of women being coerced to undergo sati, a significant number of them went willingly and there were instances where despite being held back by their relatives, they fought their way to the pyre so that they could go with their husbands. In addition, contemporary scholarship shows that some people within the local population were also opposed to sati and made arguments that mirrored those of colonial officials. Contemporary scholars are shown to believe that the sati would have eventually have come to an end in India without the intervention of the colonial government and despite the belief among the latter that sati was practiced all over India, was not as widespread and had fallen into disuse except for Calcutta and the areas surrounding it.

Provide a critical review based on a Reading dealing with the Essay

Provide a critical review based on a Reading dealing with the agencystructure relationship by any one of these theorists Anthony Giddens, Bourdieu, P., or Habermas, J., - Essay Example According to Heiskala (1990), competing epistemological frameworks prevalent before Haberman, generally revolved around structural functionalism and action theory. [Through his work, Habermas] tried to fit together social structural functionalism (Parsons in particular) and action theory (Mead and phenomenology in particular) by creating the distinction between life system and the life world to correspond to them in social reality [and highlight] the distinction between the perspective of the external observer and the perspective of actor to correspond to their theoretical ways of study. 1 By integrating structure and action through communication and other factors in the public and private realm, the current paper will illustrate significant elements of Habermas's works in order to demonstrate its' profound impact on social theory that continues to this very day. We begin the critical review by summarizing elements found in the public sphere. Habermas makes the powerful linkage between action and structure explicit through his notion of "mutual infiltration of public and private spheres" (1989, pp. 141-151). Here, Habermas suggests that it is the bourgeois, rather then any other class, that influences structures composing state and society. Legal, political, social and other specialized elements of public life come to fore as they impact the constructions of society in powerful but distinct ways. The fundamental separation of state and society in the bourgeois world was the result of a variety of phenomena within society, including legal, political, and social aspects. The interaction of these brought about a fundamental separation within various spheres of life. Specifically, the lack of political dominance also transformed the economic phenomenon and manifestation of production. In the legal and economic field however, the public and the private realms gradually became equal, with the state no longer dominating many aspects of life and production. The public and the private could not, however, remain separated as a result of civil society, as conflicts of interest often made it necessary for formal regulatory interventions to take place. Habermas refers to this as neomercantilism, which means that the political public sphere integrated with the interests of civil society in terms of interventionism. It is therefore a type of post-separation reintegration of the private and the public, but without any particular dominance of one over the other. The economic world begins to merge with the political world, where the state and business shared political and economic power reciprocally. By necessity, these circumstances stimulated state intervention [public sector] in business activities [private sector], in order to assure that certain interests were not threate ned. The purpose of interventionism in this regard was to maintain equilibrium within the system, whereas in the past it had been to maintain the power of the political elite. Habermas argues that under new systemic institutional arrangements, more political and legal power is being reciprocally exchanged and reinforced among these public authorities than ever before. Another