Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay

The wounds may have healed to an extent but the suffering is relived and borne again and again by the affected families and through them, by their younger generations. The Sikhs who faced the terror and shame of the 1984 riots have found a voice in this book which Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay, a well-known journalist and political commentator, has written almost three decades after the horrifying event. This is no fiction! Even the people whose stories he narrates have not been given any fictional names.


Reviewed by: Jaskiran Chopra

In the times we live in—where, often acknowledging, tolerating and celebrating differences is seen as a sign of weakness nothing opens better the debate on gender, as this quote from Marguerite Yourcenar’s ‘With Open Eyes’ written and published in 1980: ‘… Anyway, women who say “men” and men who say “women”, usually to complain within one group as within the other, instill in me a great sense of ennui, like do those who stumble through all that is formulaic.There are virtues that are specifically ‘feminine’ which feminists seem to scorn, this does not by the way mean that these were ever the prerogative of all women : gentleness, goodness, finesse, delicacy, virtues so important that if a man did not possess them at least in small proportions, he would be considered a brute, not a man.


Editorial

A report on a book discussion held at the India International Centre on May 24, 2016, with Indu Agnihotri, CWDS, in the chair and Vidhu Varma (JNU), Kusha Tiwari (Shyam Lal College) and Baran Faoorqi (JMI) in the panel.Prostitution is about the only job in the world in which you earn the most on your first day. As the days pass, your income declines before you finally burn out within 10–15, or if you are lucky, twenty years. Prostitution consumes your body, destroying it with the abuse, insecurity and poverty that often comes with it. The bouquet of three books under discussion approaches the subject of prostitution from multiple angles. A statement that emerges with tremendous force from these three books could be, ‘Prostitution is a choice where there is no choice.’


Reviewed by: Baran Farooqi
By Rekha

Rekha’s book attempts to chart the complex terrain of women’s writing in post-Independence India, while declaredly wishing to avoid the pitfalls of the ‘generalizations’ that are attendant on both mainstream Women’s Studies methodologies and what she calls ‘Indo-centric’ approaches to the subject. Rekha also wishes to address what she considers a significant gap in the existing oeuvre of critical work on women’s writing in India: the privileging of the ‘temporal axis’ and the insufficient attention paid to the politics of space in the shaping of women’s experience, especially as reflected in the literature produced by them. In view of this, she makes what she calls a ‘representative sampling’ of women’s prose fiction from the country, choosing the work of five major writers: Krishna Sobti (Hindi, b. 1925), Mahasweta Devi (Bengali, b. 1926), Kamal Desai (Marathi, 1928–2011), Ambai (her pseudonym, she writes as C.S. Lakshmi when she writes as a critic in Tamil and English, b. 1944) and Githa Hariharan (English, b. 1954).


Reviewed by: Trina Nileena Banerjee
Edited by Sheema Kirmani , Asif Farrukhi and Kamran Asdar Ali

Tehrik-e-Niswan, a pioneering performance group, working on gender and politics turns thirty in 2009. The group organized its first theatre festival in Karachi in 2009, followed by a Conference in 2010. The book at hand is an outcome of that conference. The volume has been originally published as Gender, Politics and Performance in South Asia by Oxford University Press, Pakistan and Women Unlimited has brought out the Indian version by arrangement with OUP. The volume has 14 papers divided into four sections, with an introduction on (Re)-presenting the Nation by Syed Jamil Ahmed. Gender is a predominant category of analysis in most papers, even though the definition of the same varies from writer to writer. Most of the articles are based on Tehrik-e-Niswan’s history, productions and reception. As such it is an amazing document of the group. The others deal with women who have paved the way for newer perspectives by their lives and works right from the late 19th century to the present. Syed Jamil Ahmed has documented the history of the play Kabar, an iconic play on Bengali Renaissance in Bangladesh in 1953. There is one article on archaeological findings of dancing and singing figures in Sindh region of Pakistan. India is represented by the introductory article and Madhu Kishwar’s article on Bollywood films.


Reviewed by: Mangai
By Aloysius Irudayam , Jayshree P. Mangubhai, & Noe I.G. Lee National Campaign on Dalit Human Rights

Dalit Women Speak Out: Caste and Gender Violence in India is a sobering book. The study, encompassing four states in India (Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu—Pondicherry) and based on interviews with 500 Dalit women, sets out to explore ‘the phenomenon of violence against Dalit women, a subject hitherto little addressed by academics, human rights activists and the Indian state’ (p. 31).The study forces our attention on a grim truth that is widely known yet ignored precisely because of its everydayness—when viewed from the constitutional and human rights perspective (human rights, the authors remind us, are ‘the foundation of human needs’ (p. 5)), the right to equality remains unrealized and inaccessible for Dalit women. Extreme forms of sexual violence and economic exploitation shape the lives of these women. Staking claim to a piece of land or one’s rightful wages or to the common resources of the village are treated as major acts of transgression.


Reviewed by: Deepa Srinivas
By Deboshruti Roychowdhury

Gender and Caste Hierarchy in Colonial Bengal by Deboshruti Roychowdhury explores how different ranks of caste groups in colonial Bengal contemplated the ‘ideal woman’. The subtitle suggests that the book might talk about significant ‘interventions’ by subordinate castes on the ‘women’s question’ in colonial Bengal, interventions that could possibly bring out the contested and variegated nature of the ideal(s). Reading the book, however, makes it clear that the author’s point is about ‘Brahmanical hegemony’ being ‘something truly total in nature’ (p. 217). Thus the author argues that claims of superior status in terms of caste were organically linked to claims of ‘purity’ which, in turn, placed oppressive burdens of chastity, fidelity, subservience and self-sacrifice invariably on women. Amid unprecedented opportunities offered by the colonial regime, low caste groups saw their improvement of social status in the imposition of oppressive patriarchal norms, ‘Brahmanical in nature’ (p. 216), on their women. Roychowdhury assumes that this meant a loss to lower caste women’s erstwhile relative freedom ‘whose way of life was subjected to fiercer scrutiny than ever before’ (p. 204). To quote her: ‘The absence of free choices for women thus became a ubiquitous phenomenon prevalent across almost all the social strata of colonial Bengal’ (p. 9).


Reviewed by: Neha Chatterji
By Purnima Mehta Bhatt

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’.


Reviewed by: Semeen Ali
By Ranjana Padhi

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.


Reviewed by: Sumit Saurabh Srivastava
Edited by Vandana Shiva

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’.


Reviewed by: Sagari R. Ramdas
Edited by Subhadra Mitra Channa and Marilyn Porter. Foreword by Joan P. Mencher

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.


Reviewed by: Manisha Rao
By Svati P. Shah

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.


Reviewed by: Reshma Bharadwaj
Edited by Saraswati Raju and Santosh Jatrana

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.


Reviewed by: Maithreyi Krishnaraj

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.


Reviewed by: Devaki Jain
By Anjali Dave

‘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.


Reviewed by: Veena Gowda
By Nalini Natarajan

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.


Reviewed by: Usha Mudiganti
By Farrah Ahmed

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).


Reviewed by: Shefali Jha
By Srimati Basu

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.


Reviewed by: Pratiksha Baxi
By Aparna Jain

I f you look at the number of books that are publishing the narratives of women, that’s a story in itself. Suddenly, the voiceless gender is speaking out—boldly, aggressively, honestly. What’s more, the second sex is getting heard—if the plethora of women centric books hitting the stores is any yardstick.Aparna Jain’s Own It tells the stories of women at the workplace and the persisting glass ceiling, while Walking Towards Ourselves is a collection of intensely personal accounts of women who have constantly faced challenges on account of their gender, colour or community. One is a business book, focusing on the issues confronting career women in organizations, while the other has a more sweeping canvas capturing a rich tapestry of real life experiences of women living in India.


Reviewed by: Chitra Narayanan
By Sarojini N. and Vrinda Marwah

This edited volume by N. Sarojini and Vrinda Marwah brings out a comprehensive understanding of the political economy of Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART). The debate on ART shows a very complex picture; on the one side, marketed as pro-women technology— often projecting it as helping women to fulfill their desire to be mothers—it also invokes questions of violence and control on women’s bodies, on the other. Any discussions on ART would navigate through this complex and paradoxical set of realities where women’s bodies are the sites for various negotiations with market, medical technologies, and ideologies.


Reviewed by: P. Bindhulakshmi
By Kanchana Mahadevan

Like other existential crises or questions, feminist dilemmas too are fraught with the need to forge an adequate praxis for the individual feminist and for the collective consciousness that we have learnt to describe as feminist. These dilemmas encompass a wide canvas of issues ranging from epistemology and morality to the concerns of change and transformation. An important axis on which one of these dilemmas is played out—across cultures—is women’s traditional roles as care givers in the private domain and their quest to free themselves of the burden of the same.


Reviewed by: Gita Chadha
By Kumkum Sangari

Solid: Liquid offers significant new insights about the emerging configurations of family and gender relations in Indian society which are increasingly being shaped by a neoliberal state and market. Focused on the practices of sex selection and commercial surrogacy, Sangari makes a strong case for the relevance, if not indispensability, of a triadic framework made up of family, state and market to analyse the emerging and persisting patriarchal configurations in contemporary India. As revealed through an incisive analysis of the uses to which assisted reproductive technologies have been put in India, this work shows that patriarchal practices exist both within and outside a transnational capitalist regime and must not be mistaken as ‘women’s issues’ (p. 156).


Reviewed by: Anuja Agrawal
Edited by Bhargavi V. Davar and T.K. Sundari Ravindran

As is reflected in the title, this is a fascinating anthology that looks critically at knowledges, identities and institutions related to women’s mental health. Each of these are very lofty concepts and constructions in themselves that find elaborate deconstruction and articulation in the nine essays that comprise this book. The field of Mental Health in contemporary times has become truly multidisciplinary in nature and draws extensively from the frameworks of Philosophy, Sociology, Psychology, Psychiatry, Literature, Law, Human Rights and Gender Studies. This enables new conceptualizations and perspectives to emerge. Likewise, recognizing the importance of pluralism, multiplicity and diverse realities flowing from varied cultures and contexts, in understanding the subjective worlds and experiences of individuals, who are emotionally disturbed, victims of trauma, suffering or afflicted with disease, often labelled as being of ‘unsound mind’, is also essential. All the nine essayists recognize these dimensions and raise questions about the existing systems, beliefs and practices which perpetuate the use of labels, stigma and mechanical rendering of therapeutic services and justice to women.


Reviewed by: Namita Ranganathan
By Chayanika Shah , Raj Merchant, Shals Mahajan, Smriti Nevatia

What this book does from the start is interpellate the reader, literally asking them the question—where are you from? Are[n’t] you an outlaw too? Is there any way to speak of these things other than from the position of the implicated, interested outlaw? And as it takes the reader on the methodologically risky and provisional journey of finding and giving voice for outlaws, and in the process revisiting models of speech, it offers innumerable possibilities— of language, milestones, and networks.


Reviewed by: Asha Achuthan
Edited by Ashleigh Barnes

The title of this book suggests two very significant things. The first is that a unified field of feminism is a misnomer and the second that there is a considerable amount of restlessness with feminist theory and politics. Both these elements actually make the domain of feminist scholarship and practice very charged and challenging, and open and dynamic.The most exciting aspect of trying to map the terrain of feminist scholarship is twofold. First, that it is intrinsically linked with the lived experiences of men and women, second, that it draws its energies by critiquing and engaging in a dialogue with its own understanding. Feminist politics and scholarship has to be amongst the most selfcritical intellectual terrains.


Reviewed by: Krishna Menon
By Deepti Misri

What does it mean to say that the history of postcolonial India has been a history of violence? Given the daily barrage of reports on the escalating violence in India, such a claim may seem alarmingly familiar, even eerily ordinary. Can there be a more opportune time for an extensive discussion of sexuality, gender and violence in postcolonial India? Each and every day, it seems, we are confronted yet again by the systemic violation of subaltern subjects, marked by one or more intersecting vectors of difference: caste, class, gender, sexual orientation, to name a select few. On the one hand, recent events have ignited a much-needed robust and public conversation on gender, sexuality and cultural practices within India. The relationship between organized feminism,


Reviewed by: Anjali Arondekar

Arecurring question while I was choosing the books for this special issue on gender was: does one pick up books that analyse social formations and institutions, cultural meanings and practices, economy and polity, using gender as an analytical category or those which use ‘woman’ as a synonym for gender, attempting to alter, add, re-define existing knowledge and make a critical statement about the prevailing structural inequality? The collection before you (and part of the August issue since all the reviews could not be accommodated in this volume) reflects the eclectic and fraught terrain of variegated perspectives, methodologies and sources. Another consideration was to include books that are in close conversation with feminist ideas and share the commitment of feminist praxis, which may (not) analyse gender relations in a conventional sense but expand the scope to think about critical events, governance, performance, arts, literature, high politics, etc.


Reviewed by: Geeta Thatra