Includes bibliographical references (pages 151-164) and index
Contents:
Resituating gender and violence during the Great War -- The violent Mahatma : Gandhi and the rehabilitation of Indian manhood -- Measures of manliness : the martial races and the wartime politics of effeminacy -- Frontline masculinity : the Indian Corps on the Western Front, 1914-1915 -- The road to Amritsar -- Epilogue : The historical stakes of new imperial history.
Summary:
"By the outbreak of the Great War, conventional wisdom in the British Empire held that the Briton alone possessed the 'manly' traits of logic and self-control necessary for good governance. Coupled with this was the belief that India's western-educated nationalist elite suffered from a crippling effeminacy of body and mind that precluded political power and independence. During the First World War, however, the colony sent over one million troops abroad to fight, fundamentally upsetting this symmetry and allowing Indian nationalists to challenge the tenets of colonial masculinity. What had been a moment of imperial unity in 1914 deteriorated into an increasingly bitter dispute over the relationship between 'native' effeminacy and India's postwar fitness for self-rule. In this groundbreaking, carefully argued study, author Robert McLain demonstrates that this dispute assumed a rhetorical ferocity that culminated in the actual physical violence of the Amritsar Massacre of 1919, when British led troops shot hundreds of unarmed Indian civilians. In this way, the Empire's reliance on gender as an ideological apparatus was deeply interwoven with the use of violence as an inherent and persistent feature of imperial power"--Provided by publisher.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.