Spanning across colonial and postcolonial timelines, various academic disciplines, and several regions in India, Gender in Modern India: History, Culture, Marginality, edited by Lata Singh and Shashank Sekhar Sinha (published by Oxford University Press in 2024), focuses on three significant themes of the development of gender studies in modern India that have resonance with the lifeworks of Professor Biswamoy Pati: history, culture and marginality. These themes often find themselves intertwined in the different sub-themes explored throughout the book.
Remaining true to the larger themes of history, culture and marginality, within the first sub-theme on the intersection of patriarchy and caste hierarchy in India, Uma Chakravarti’s chapter “Locating Consent: The Social and Historical Contexts of ‘Choice’ in Marriage”, argues that despite the political concern with women’s rights in eighteenth and nineteenth-century colonial India, the oppressive and overlapping structures of patriarchy, caste, class and gender in questions of consent and choice in marriage, remained undisturbed by these reforms. On the other hand, in the same section, Smita M Patil’s chapter is symbolic of the resistance against these intersections of caste and patriarchy in India. She delves into the critique of patriarchy, caste and gender, in the Marathi writings of Jyotiba and Savitribai Phule, Mukta Salve and Tarabai Shinde, and later in the writings of Shahu Maharaj and B.R. Ambedkar, highlights the uniquely different trajectory that this stream of critique took from the mainstream social reform movements during the colonial era in India, that specifically centred around religion.
Under the second sub-theme of exploring the gendered nature of the interactions between the colonial government and the tribal communities in India, Sajal Nag and R.Lalsangpuii illustrate the history of female chieftains in the tribal regions of Northeast India during colonial rule. As a fitting companion piece, Shashank Shekhar Sharma, in “Adivasis, Gender, and Witch-Hunting in Early Colonial Chotanagpur and Santhal Parganas,” argues that colonialism created newer forms of marginalisation for Adivasi women, whereby economic strain and exclusionary policies of colonisers resulted in an increased rate of violence against women in the name of the social and cultural protest of witch-hunting.
M V Shobhana Warrior’s chapter “Women, Union, and the Strike Against Sexual Harassment in Colonial Madurai, 1920,” in the third section on the political economy and women’s labour, focuses on the protests by women factory workers in colonial Madurai against sexual harassment and exploitation. Expanding on the same sub-theme, Indu Agnihotri investigates how the Great Depression impacted women’s lives in Punjab, particularly how women’s labour contributed significantly to farming, spinning clothes for the family, and how they even ended up pawning their jewellery for the family’s survival. The most insidious aftermath of these economic shifts within the family’s way of life was the increased importance of dowry while doing away with the erstwhile bride price customs since it meant strengthening men’s control over the family’s finances, undermining the women’s role in the survival of the family.
Exploring the fourth sub-theme on masculinity and sexuality, reading Dalit women’s writings as archives, Charu Gupta’s chapter “Fragmentary Histories, Subaltern Sexualities, and Vernacular Archives” shows how these writings serve as a counter-archive or counterpublic which tells the stories of Dalit women in a new and independent light. A lot of these writings portray Dalit women as viranganas who as an important part of the revolt of 1857, and they were pivotal in countering the socially dominant narratives which perceived Dalit women as passive and hypersexualised.
In section five, on the gendered nature of building healthcare institutions in colonial India, Ranjana Saha argues that the colonial government’s psychological force of infantilization of Indians, alongside the liberal Western-educated Indian reformers’ support for Western medicine led to the categorisation of Indian midwives or “dais” as “dirty”. This of course also had much to do with the already existing dominant discourse on caste-based purity and pollution since the majority of the midwives were from the lower castes.
On the sub-theme of culture and identity, Lata Singh writes that the Muslim courtesans in colonial India were patrons of art, culture and language and some of them were quite involved in the independence struggle. It was only in the late colonial era that Muslim courtesans began to be stigmatised and stereotyped as the figure of the Other to adhere to the idea of a nation-state that would have a Hindu majority. Pushing the theme of culture and identity further, Dev Nath Pathak’s chapter “Margin(al) Maithili: Cultural Politics of Engendered Folk in Mithila,” illustrates how the dominance of Brahmanical patriarchy along with caste ideologies at the Ugratara festival in Bihar, leads to the marginalisation of the Maithili folklore of a powerful feminine goddess Ugratara. Instead of the plurality of values that Ugratara’s iconography symbolizes, the festival has become a sanitised version of a monolithic kind.
In the concluding section on migration and new dynamics, tracing the migration patterns of unmarried single women in Rajnagar, Kendrapara District in Odisha, as garment factory workers to Kerala, and from Ganjam District as live-in domestic workers to Mumbai, Indrani Mazumdar’s chapter illustrates that one must look beyond the dichotomy between “aspirational migration” and “distress migration”. In both cases, the agrarian crisis in their hometowns drives them to migrate and it also indicates a time-bound (until their marriage) youthful female aspiration.
This edited volume stands out as a collection of diverse forms of engagement with gender studies in India. Given the promise of exploring the gender question in the introduction of the book, the one form of engagement that seems to be missing is with any kind of queer identity and politics. However, from colonial to postcolonial India, discussing issues of caste, patriarchy, tribal identity, labour and migration, as well as culture and sexuality, this edited volume remains faithful to the overarching themes of exploring history, culture and marginalities that have shaped the discourse on gender in modern India.
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Atreyee Sengupta is a PhD candidate at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London.