Baddena biography samples

Back in the 1960s, Marshall Hodgson proposed the terms “Islamicate” and “Islamdom” to refer to those parts of the world that were inspired by a certain material, literary, and aesthetic sensibility – even if such regions did not have a majority Muslim population. “By the sixteenth century,” he wrote,

most of the East Christian, Hindu, and Theravada Buddhist peoples found themselves more or less enclaved in an Islamicate world where Muslim standards of taste commonly made their way even into independent kingdoms like Hindu Vijayanagar or Norman Sicily.

By citing Vijayanagara and Sicily, Hodgson signaled that he was referring to something very different from conventional understandings of the “Muslim world.” After all, a Hindu ruling class governed the south Indian state of Vijayanagara, Christians governed Sicily, and neither had many resident Muslims. So, by adapting the term “Islamdom” from “Christendom,” and by inventing the term “Islamicate,” Hodgson sought to theorize those parts of the world that exhibited what he called “the more egalitarian and cosmopolitan tendencies in Irano-Semitic culture.”

Although Hodgson’s neologisms were admittedly unwieldy, he was at least struggling to account for historical processes such as cultural imitation or assimilation, or a subset of what we might call premodern “globalization.” But the problem with his formulation is that because the terms “Islamdom” and “Islamicate” contain the word “Islam,” their usage implies some sort of interaction with the superhuman world, when in fact Hodgson was referring to structures such as former government buildings in Vijayanagara that had nothing to do with such interactions, but which happened to feature pointed arches, domes, or vaulted arcades. Some art historians have even called these same structures “Islamic-styled.” On the other hand, for many years art histori

‘She had worn her best saree to come and learn cycling. At a “cycling training camp” in Pudukkottai, Tamil Nadu. She was exuberant with good cause. Some 4,000 very poor women in her district had come to control the quarries where they were once bonded labourers. Their organised struggle, combined with a politically conscious literacy movement, made Pudukkottai a better place’. – P. Sainath

This dossier features portraits of the daily struggles of Indian women, primarily drawn by women artists from India and across the Global South based on photographs by Indian photographers. These are scenes of life in the fuller sense of the word – of joy, labour, anger, and resistance – along the arduous path towards women’s emancipation. They are images of a fuller humanity that is owed to all workers, peasants, women, mothers, and daughters.

A few centuries ago, the Telugu poet Baddena wrote a lyrical paean to the role of a wife: someone who works like a servant, feeds like a mother, looks like a goddess, pleasures like a prostitute, and has the forbearance of the earth. These ‘womanly virtues’ strung into poetry in the 13th century resonate so much with modern Indian society that this poem is often glorified in movies, music, and literature even today.

For Indian women, each of these ‘virtues’ translates into facets of oppression representing domestic drudgery, the objectification of the body and sexuality, and the expectation that women should