Unfamiliar Relations: Family and History in South Asia

If the nation is an imagined community, so too is the family. Though both "nation" and "family" materially conditioned human lives in the past, only the former has had the benefit of historical scrutiny from scholars of Modern South Asia. The latter — the family — has been generally taken for granted. This interdisciplinary volume tries simultaneously to interrogate, and fill, the long silence in the history of the family in South Asia. Scholars of history, literature and social anthropology come together here to open up a diverse archive from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. Their essays reveal the political and ideological work involved in imagining the family, writing about it, and, at the same time, living in it. This book thus collectively outlines changing notions of history, power, knowledge and affection in the South Asian past. By piecing together narratives of specific families and households from complex sources, the essayists reveal multiple and new ways of thinking about the "political" in this region’s history. At the same time, some of the contributions, while tracing the history of numerous generations or locations of a single family over multiple land masses, ask us to rethink the spatial limits that modern historians have imposed on their own imaginations while thinking about the past. In doing all this, the book is a significant contribution to the current debate on the nature of colonial transitions. It also vitally enriches existing scholarship on gender, heterosexuality, race, caste and state-formation.