Contesting Terrains

This collection of seven essays with a thought-provoking introduction broadly recreates the contesting terrains of gender, sexuality and women’s rights to property in the 19th and early 20th century of the colonial period in India. Unlike several other writings of the same genre that posit the convergence of colonial and indigenous patriarchies in undermining women’s freedom and customary rights, the essays in this book attempt to recover the agency and subjectivity of women in various locales—the courts, prisons, theatre, literature, poetry and other art forms. The papers attempt to comprehend and amplify women’s everyday resistances against coercive structures. The editor suggests that ‘women often imaginatively scrutinize and critique the social world that they experience, and give voice to it in subversive expressive traditions or actions…’ (p. 2). As opposed to the more violent or spectacular forms of protest by exploited groups which have received attention, the essays attempt to understand women’s silences, protest and complicity in the context of colonial power.

There is an ongoing thread of a moral discourse that the papers subtly point to, by which gender identities are constructed, represented, negotiated and contested in everyday life.

The papers by Padma Anagol and Nita Verma Prasad unravel the way women used the courts and litigation to resist the changing property laws in colonial Maharashtra and in colonial North India, respectively. Through a detailed and painstaking study of different historical texts and records, Anagol covers a spectrum of resistances. The symbolic resistance by the first woman Marathi playwright, Girijabai Kelkar through her play (Men’s Rebellion); the assertion of propertied women against the gender unjust land administration policies through series of litigations and policies;