Full Description
Gender in Modern India brings together pioneering research on a range of themes including social reforms, caste, and contestations; Adivasis, patriarchy, and colonialism; capitalism, political economy, and labour; masculinity and sexuality; health, medical care, and institution building; culture and identity; and migration and its new dynamics.
Commissioned in remembrance of the prolific social historian Biswamoy Pati, this volume examines the gender question through a multilayered and multi-dimensional frame in which interdisciplinarity and intersectionality play an important role. Using case studies on gender from diverse geographies—east, west, north, south, and northeast; community locations—Hindu, Muslim, and Christian; and marginalized socio-economic or ethnic habitations such as those of Dalits and Adivasis, the contributors highlight the complexities and diversities of women's negotiations of patriarchies in varied social, ethnic, and community contexts.
Collectively, the chapters in this volume focus on three related and overlapping settings—colonial, colonial and postcolonial continuum, and postcolonial. They delineate the multiple lives of gender by focusing on its intersections with other markers of difference including race, class, caste, sexuality, culture, ethnicity, region, and occupation, thereby questioning stereotypes, challenging dated notions and interpretations of gender, and demonstrating the ubiquity of patriarchy.
Contents
Preface and Acknowledgements
Notes on Contributors
Introduction
Section I: Reforms, Castes, and Contestations
1: Uma Chakravarti: Locating Consent: The Social and Historical Contexts of 'Choice' in Marriage
2: Smita M Patil: Gender, Caste, and Patriarchy: Anti-Caste Movements in Colonial Maharashtra
Section II: Tribes, Patriarchy, and Colonialism
3: Sajal Nag and R Lalsangpuii: Reversing of Gender: Anti-Colonial Resistance by Women Warriors in Northeast India
4: Shashank Shekhar Sinha: Adivasis, Gender, and Witch hunting in Early Colonial Chotanagpur and Santhal Parganas
Section III: Political Economy and Labour
5: M V Shobhana Warrier: Women, Union, and the Strike Against Sexual Harassment in Colonial Madura, 1920
6: Indu Agnihotri: Negotiating Crisis: The Great Depression and Women's Lives in Colonial Punjab
Section IV: Masculinity and Sexuality
7: Charu Gupta: Fragmentary Histories, Subaltern Sexualities, and Vernacular Archives
8: Prem Chowdhry: White Femininity-Black Masculinity: Imperialism, Racism, and Gender Relations in an Empire Film (The Rains Came)
Section V: Health, Medical Care, and Institution Building
9: Ranjana Saha: Midwifery, Childbirth, and Breastfeeding Advice in Colonial Bengal
10: Rama V Baru: Women Missionaries in Medical Care and Institution Building in India
Section VI: Culture and Identity
11: Lata Singh: The Muslim Courtesans in Colonial India
12: Dev Nath Pathak: Margin(al) Maithili: Cultural Politics of Engendered Folk in Mithila
Section VII: Migrations and Their Emerging Dynamics
13: Rajni Palriwala: Doing Care, Making Socialities on the Move: Gendering Internal Migration in India
14: Indrani Mazumdar: Mapping Marginal Terrains: Corridors of Women's Labour Migration from Odisha
Index
