"House/daughter/nation: Interiority, Architecture, and Historical Imagination in Janaki Majumdar's ""Family History"

Burton, A.M.

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/2323 Copy

Description

Title

"House/daughter/nation: Interiority, Architecture, and Historical Imagination in Janaki Majumdar's ""Family History"

Author(s)

Burton, A.M.

Issue Date

1997

Keyword(s)

• Women
• Social Status
• Households
• Great Britain
• Majumdar, Janaki
• India
• Nationalism

Abstract

"In an age of virtual reality, cyberspace, and migration of global proportions, the very possibility of home is being vigorously contested. Whether it is identified as ""Africa,"" England, India or, more subversively, the ""black Atlantic,"" home is neither a stationary place nor a self-evident trope. Like all historical utterances, it is both fictional and contingent, inflected by the particular social contexts out of which it is fashioned and, of equal significance, defying the very materiality and permanence it appears to embody as well. What concerns me here is how and under what conditions home is recalled when a woman takes up the task of mapping domestic genealogies as a daughter, and how the architecture she produces ends up figuring the nation in history. More specifically, I want to examine what this work of reconstruction meant in the context of 1930s Indian nation-building, in the hands of a prominent nationalist's daughter who was bold enough to chronicle her family's history and, in the process, to reveal her own persistent desire for the elusive fiction of home. (from the article)"

Publisher

Cambridge University Press for the Association of Asian Studies

ISSN

0021-9118

Type of Resource

text

Language

en

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http://hdl.handle.net/2142/2323

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