Reminding us that the road to the complete empowerment of women in India is a long one, this book focuses on the globalization experiences of women from the Indian urban middle class. It covers reconstructing gender, violence, media, neo-liberal globalization, information and communication technologies, and politics.
Reminding us that the road to the complete empowerment of women in India is a long one, this book focuses on the globalization experiences of women from the Indian urban middle class. It covers reconstructing gender, violence, media, neo-liberal globalization, information and communication technologies, and politics.
The author traces the history of Indian women from the nineteenth century under colonial rule, to the twentieth century after Independence. She begins with the reform movement, established by men to educate women, and demonstrates how education changed their lives, enabling them to take part in public life. Through the women's own accounts, the author has compiled an accessible and immediate record of their achievements over the past two centuries, which will be of interest to students of South Asia and to anyone concerned with women and their history.
Half the world's population now lives in cities. Governments and international development agencies have made housing the urban poor a priority, but few focus on women's needs. Based on research conducted in Ahmedabad in collaboration with the Self-Employed Women's Association (SEWA), this book maps the constraints and opportunities that low-income women throughout the Global South face in securing property, which remains overwhelmingly in male hands. Their experiences and vulnerabilities open a window to assess not only land tenure and property laws but also potential solutions such as microcredit financing and diverse theoretical approaches to gender and development.
Based on extensive fieldwork in Calcutta, this book provides the first ethnography of how middle-class women in India understand and experience economic change through transformations of family life. It explores their ideas, practices and experiences of marriage, childbirth, reproductive change and their children's education, and addresses the impact that globalization is having on the new middle classes in Asia more generally from a domestic perspective. By focusing on maternity, the book explores subjective understandings of the way intimate relationships and the family are affected by India's liberalization policies and the neo-liberal ideologies that accompany through an analysis of often competing ideologies and multiple practices. And by drawing attention to women's agency as wives, mothers and grandmothers within these new frameworks, Domestic Goddesses discusses the experiences of different age groups affected by these changes. Through a careful analysis of women's narratives, the domestic sphere is shown to represent the key site for the remaking of Indian middle-class citizens in a global world.
This book lays out the different and complex dimensions of urbanisation in India. It brings together contributors with expertise in fields as varied as demography, geography, economics, political science, sociology, anthropology, architecture, planning and land use, environmental sciences, creative writing, filmmaking and grassroots activism to reflect on and examine India’s urban experience. It discusses various dimensions of city life—how to define the urban; the conditions generating work, living and (in)security; the nature of contemporary cities; the dilemmas of creating and executing urban policy, planning and governance; and the issues concerning ecology and environment. The volume also articulates and evaluates the way Indian urbanism promotes and organises aspirations and utopias of the people, whilst simultaneously endorsing disparities, depravities and conflicts. The volume includes interventions that shape contemporary debates. Comprehensive, accessible and topical, it will be useful to scholars and researchers of urban studies, urban sociology, development studies, public policy, economics, political studies, gender studies, city studies, planning and governance. It will also interest practitioners, think tanks and NGOs working on urban issues.
This is a book about embodiment and identity in the context of particular women’s lives in an urban setting. It is concerned with the development of a sociology of embodiment in the context of women’s lives in contemporary, urban India. The focus on embodiment is mediated by gender and class, two critical elements that constitute identity in relation to embodiment. The study is based on material collected from interviews with working class women in an urban slum and with professional, upper class women, with young women in secondary schools and from material from a women’s magazine.
Inspired by egalitarian doctrines, the Dalit communities in India have been fighting for basic human and civic rights since the middle of the nineteenth century. In this book, Shailaja Paik focuses on the struggle of Dalit women in one arena - the realm of formal education – and examines a range of interconnected social, cultural and political questions. What did education mean to women? How did changes in women’s education affect their views of themselves and their domestic work, public employment, marriage, sexuality, and childbearing and rearing? What does the dissonance between the rhetoric and practice of secular education tell us about the deeper historical entanglement with modernity as experienced by Dalit communities? Dalit Women's Education in Modern India is a social and cultural history that challenges the triumphant narrative of modern secular education to analyse the constellation of social, economic, political and historical circumstances that both opened and closed opportunities to many Dalits. By focusing on marginalised Dalit women in modern Maharashtra, who have rarely been at the centre of systematic historical enquiry, Paik breathes life into their ideas, expectations, potentials, fears and frustrations. Addressing two major blind spots in the historiography of India and of the women’s movement, she historicises Dalit women’s experiences and constructs them as historical agents. The book combines archival research with historical fieldwork, and centres on themes including slum life, urban middle classes, social and sexual labour, and family, marriage and children to provide a penetrating portrait of the actions and lives of Dalit women. Elegantly conceived and convincingly argued, Dalit Women's Education in Modern India will be invaluable to students of History, Caste Politics, Women and Gender Studies, Education Studies, Urban Studies and Asian studies.
This book foregrounds the subjectivity of ‘acting women’ amidst violent debates on femininity and education, livelihood and labour, sexuality and marriage. It looks at the emergence of the stage actress as an artist and an ideological construct at critical phases of performance practice in British India. The focus here is on Calcutta, considered the ‘second city of the Empire’ and a nodal point in global trade circuits. Each chapter offers new ways of conceptualising the actress as a professional, a colonial subject, simultaneously the other and the model of the ‘new woman’. An underlying motif is the playing out of the idea of spiritual salvation, redemption and modernity. Analysing the dynamics behind stagecraft and spectacle, the study highlights the politics of demarcation and exclusion of social roles. It presents rich archival work from diverse sources, many translated for the first time. This book makes a distinctive contribution in intertwining performance studies with literary history and art practices within a cross-cultural framework. Interdisciplinary and innovative, it will appeal to scholars and researchers in South Asian theatre and performance studies, history and gender studies.
‘Indian Democracy’ is an attempt to understand the development of democratic polity in India. It covers a wide range of issues – theoretical concepts, political institutions, federalism, electoral process, individual and group rights and mass media – drawing attention to the significant broadening of Indian democracy.