What makes this book a unique read is that it focuses not on any stepwells in Gujarat but on stepwells that were commissioned by women between the 7th and the 19th centuries— we are talking about the connect that stepwells and women had which was not restricted only to women drawing water from them but also of women creating a space for themselves at the stepwells. The book opens with two pictures facing each other—one is a map of the important stepwells commissioned by women or built to honour them while the other picture is that of a group of women on their way to the wells with their water pots. The book begins by tracing the importance of water for rituals and traditions across India. Bhatt traces the history behind the construction of wells and stepwells which were regarded as ‘acts of charity’.
One of the first thoughts after going through the book under review is the sense of deep dissatisfaction and unease with the dominant model of development as induced by World Bank and International Monetary Fund manifested in Structural Adjustment Programmes being practised in the name of development in India in general and Punjab in particular. From the feminist lens the resultant situation is more alarming as it is the women who have and are still bearing the aftershocks of such lopsided understanding and practice of development as ‘… development policy in general, and structural adjustment in particular, is not gender-neutral’ (DeshmukhRanadive, 2003: viii). Padhi’s book is an account through the voices of women survivors i.e., Jat-Sikh wives and widows and mothers how their lives are fraught with economic and familial insecurities, helplessness, humiliation in the wake of suicide committed by the male members of the family due to inability to repay back the loan to the local money lender, the arhtiya. Through the extensive fieldwork conducted intermittently during 2006–2010 of the selected villages, the author judiciously uses both questionnaire and interview tools to elicit data in narrative form which later on has been qualitatively and quantitatively analysed to arrive at ‘patterns’ of ‘structured layers of class, caste and patriarchy’ (pp. 168) affecting women. The agrarian milieu of districts of the Malwa region, Punjab provides the setting of the study. The choice of the region is much guided by the fact that it has been the seedbed of green revolution.
Because the darkness is never so distant,’ ————-W. H. AudenBrian D. Freese writes in the preface that ‘all literary depictions of the Holocaust end as failures’. ‘Holocaust is but an approximation of what happened. The species cannot grasp its nature for the word is not the thing itself’. The species, he asserts elsewhere, is ‘damaged, for only a damaged species could have committed the Holocaust.’ The author starts with a pessimism born of long years devoted to understanding the phenomenon.
Since the emergence to power of the Sangh Parivar and the dominance in Indian politics of a narrow-minded majoritarianism, there has been an understandable tendency towards nostalgia for the so-called ‘Nehruvian’ period. This is a tendency in which this reviewer has also participated: in publication projects that have more or less been based on backward glances to what seems in retrospect a ‘golden age’ of the Indian state. But the nostalgia for a more tolerant and less exclusionary (in terms of income, class, caste, gender) India can go too far in invoking the ‘Nehruvian’ as such a golden age
In the Club is a welcome addition to the study of colonialism and colonial bourgeois sociality in South Asia. The book is not so much a history of clubs as it is a study of the formation and articulation of social relations in clubs. Though the network of clubs played a significant role in the unfolding of colonialism in South Asia, it is still a relatively ignored area in the historiography of colonial encounters. In fact, this is the first book-length survey of clubs in this part of the world. It is not dedicated to a particular city.
Rabindranath Tagore’s visit to Italy in 1925, and especially the controversial tour of Italy in 1926 at the invitation of Benito Mussolini, has been a matter of interest to Tagore scholars for a long time. The acceptance of an invitation from a Fascist dictator by a great humanist baffled the international community of that time. The encounter also aroused a good deal of media interest both within and outside Italy.
As the title suggests, P. Sanal Mohan’s Modernity of Slavery, employs a multidisciplinary approach and marks a significant contribution towards understanding the history of oppression within the story of modernity. By exploring the hitherto neglected histories of slave caste populations in colonial Kerala, he makes a passionate attempt to recover lost voices.
A representative from Monsanto, the world’s largest seed company that today controls 65% of the global seed market for maize and more than a quarter of the world’s commercial seed market, is on record to have defined the problem to securing a Global Intellectual Property Rights Agreement as: ‘Farmers save seeds’—and thus they offered a solution: ‘Seed saving should be made illegal’.
The edited volume under review by anthropologist Subhadra Mitra Channa and sociologist Marilyn Porter focuses on a wide range of case studies from across the world related to ways in which women manage environmental resources. The book is a product of the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences (IUAES) meeting held in China in 2009. The contributors to the volume show the connections between increasing poverty and global capitalist exploitation that negatively affects women’s access to resources. As recognized by the UN Security Council, since the 1990s, most conflicts around the world are related to disputes over natural resources, whether they are over oil, water, mining or access to land to grow crops. Women have played an important role in the peace processes.
This book as the author claims ‘draws upon her PhD dissertation written more than a quarter of a century ago’. She fears that the definition of ‘cultural history at that time was rather narrow and the broad spectrum that is attached today to this branch of historical study was unknown those days’. She apologizes for the narrative style of her compendium which she admits is ‘overburdened with data’ and is apprehensive about the ‘readability of the book’ because she admits that her ‘youthful enthusiasm as a researcher’ led to a kind of ‘data fetishism’.
What has sex work got to do with private water tanks or making of hair pins or average rainfall in Marathwada? In Street Corner Secrets, Svati P. Shah critically engage with the academic knowledge production which ignores such connections. She debunks the figure of the lonely sex worker lurking timidly among the shadows by the street or who remains confined within brothels. Instead she situates women engaged in sexual commerce firmly amidst thick descriptions of migration, informal labour economy, land speculation, urban housing projects, infrastructure underdevelopment of rural areas, ecological degradation, water scarcity, displacement, caste politics and gendered inequalities in the wage labour market. These also mark the compulsions or constraints surrounding the livelihood choices of women including sex work.
In 1981, the Kolhan Raksha Sangh, an adivasi political organization formed in Singhbhum in 1977, declared that Kolhan1 was a sovereign state, independent from India. A delegation of the representatives of this ‘Kolhan republic’ went to Delhi, and thereafter to England. The delegates claimed that Kolhan was legally outside India’s territory and was entitled to self-government under Wilkinson’s Rules since there was no official document of merger between Kolhan and the State of India.
While providing new opportunities to women workers, global capitalism, tends to both not only use prevailing gender stereotypes but rearticulates them. This is the core message of the book. Surveying women’s location in varied professions from high tech occupations, to traditionally male dominated professions, while there is exploitation, there is also a degree of agency exercised by women. Metro cities belying the assumption of a liberal, more accommodating spaces to women nonetheless re-entrench culturally engraved sociocultural norms about where women can work and what kind of work is permissible. Looking at different locations where they work like petty production work, home based work, modern professions that require education and special skills and training, what emerges is this: gender norms pose limits to what they can gain through equal wages and equal access to positions of power and leadership. Equal wages is sidelined by segmentation of work into gender segregated work.
Piketty’s book Capital in the 21st Century has burst upon the sky of economics, like a huge round of fire crackers. It has sold 2 million copies and has been translated into several languages. The book has focused on economic inequality—its source and its impact. Piketty’s main thrust is to reveal that the wealthy, he calls it the one percent, will continue to accumulate wealth. He reveals the dynamics of such a process, and then concentrates on the tax system as a possible source to reduce this phenomenon. It is of course a startling revelation, especially the argument on the process.
Saumya Dey’s Becoming Hindus and Muslims tries to provide an alternative understanding of the growth of HinduMuslim identities in the region of Bengal. He challenges the understanding of historians that attributed primacy to the coming of colonialism in forming Indian identities like the ever so contested Hindu-Muslim identity. The book then wants to shatter the myth that prior to the arrival of colonialism Indians were not conscious of group labels like ‘Hindus’ and ‘Muslims’.
‘The Special Cells are located in the police system to draw on the power of the law and the Constitution to aid abused women to rebuild their lives, but this power is neither benign nor apolitical’ writes Anjali Dave in Women Survivors of Violence; Genesis and Growth of a State Support System. There is no one better qualified than Anjali Dave—a feminist activist, social worker and teacher—to critically look at the course and consequence of engaging with the state to address the issue of violence against women.
2016
Anxiety about the safety of women in India has always been a topic of discussion in social and academic meetings. While articulate non-academics bemoan the continuing relevance of the topic in a developing and seemingly modern society, academics attempt to understand the underlying reasons for the persistent perception of women as vulnerable beings. The debate took a more urgent turn when world media reported the gang rape of a young physiotherapy intern in a moving bus on one of the arterial roads of Dehi during the night of December 16, 2012. The media’s coverage of the incident and civil society’s mobilization to demand an amendment in the law led to the passing of The Criminal Law (Amendement) Act of 2013.
Looking at the proceedings of the Constituent Assembly of India, between November 1948 and January 1949, one is compelled to note the immense amount of criticism that the draft constitution evoked. One of the draft articles that came up for discussion was the then Article 35 which stated that the state should endeavour to establish a Uniform Civil Code in India. In response, one member complained that the draft constitution lacked any ‘provisions which safeguard the personal law of the people’ (Nov. 8, 1948). Another member insisted that ‘The right of a group or a community of people to follow and adhere to its own personal law is among the fundamental rights and this provision should really be amongst the statutory justiciable fundamental rights’ (November 23, 1948).
There is growing concern among a section of scholars that the ebbing away of the spirit of Punjabiyat results in erosion of interest in Punjab Studies. They strive to identify some of those over-arching Punjabi ties that communicate the message of Punjabiyat stretched across the five doabs and facilitate forging ties across the religious boundaries. These scholarly initiatives struggle to outline Punjab’s cultural diversity and portray experiences of plurality that flow along the Radcliffe boundary of the Indo-Pakistan subcontinent and keep its residents aware of how Punjabiyat is still breathing in the lives of millions of Punjabis.
The book begins with an evocative gaze that lingers over the writing on the walls of family courts in Kolkata. The writing on the walls of the courts invites attention to what Srimati Basu characterizes as the disciplinary governmentality of courts; seductive calls for alternative dispute resolution; normative pictures of family and marriage and finally, a ‘noble’ feminism according women honour and protection within matrimony. The pedagogical function of the walls frames the discourses that a litigant engages with in the court or in a counsellor’s office. This ethnographic account leads us to the multiple places where law sits and rises to adjudicate, mediate and constitute everyday troubles of matrimonial life.