At a time when doubling farmer’s income in the next five years has become the catch phrase, the policy emphasis is on the oft-beaten approach of boosting crop productivity, reducing the cost of cultivation, expanding the area under irrigation and providing a unified national agricultural market.
Years of feminist research have taught us that gender is a significant component of our identity. The script of gender may be provided by social norms but gender remains integral to how a self experiences his or her identity, as well as to how others identify one. Masculinity and femininity, as two dominant forms in which one’s gender identity is manifested, are the object of study in the articles being reviewed here. Manuella Ciotti’s edited Unsettling the Archetypes: Femininities and Masculinities in Indian Politics is a collection of articles which examines the effect on gender identities of political struggles of non-elite groups in Indian society and they negotiate their gender identity when they struggle against their non-elite status.
I begin my review of Amina Jamal’s Jamaat-e-Islami Women in Pakistan: Vanguard of a New Modernity with a couple of questions which I consider pertinent: Do women’s multiple narratives reveal a capacity for alternative ways of negotiating the construction of conflictual identities? Does the assumption of agential roles by traditional women in a patriarchal culture cause an identity conflict crisis which can be resolved through a firm commitment to specific values and goals? Women, as evidenced by the work of constructive and rehabilitative work undertaken by political and social women activists in South Asia during both turbulent and peaceful times, have more or less power depending on their specific situation, and they can be relatively submissive in one situation and relatively assertive in another.
Let me begin by confessing I am not the most appropriate reviewer for this book. When I volunteered to review the book, I was certain that the book would be about transnational commercial surrogacy or biocapital, as Kaushik Sunder Rajan’s work brilliantly shows us, where finance capital is intermeshed with trade in body parts: ova, fertilized embryos, embryonic stem cells and cord blood, a global business running into trillions.
Bhangya Bhukya’s The Roots of the Periphery: A History of the Gonds of Deccan India is a comprehensive history of the Gonds of Deccan India, an adivasi community. The research is based upon a wide range of sources ranging from the manuscripts, census, gazetteers, published government reports, journals and newspapers, unpublished documents, interviews and secondary sources.
Madhumita Sengupta’s Becoming Assamese: Colonialism and New Subjectivities in Northeast India is a welcome contribution to the study of colonialism and the making of 19th century Assam. The relations between the two processes have been the subject of research in the past, and continues to attract attention today. These researches have tried to look into aspects such as state making, political economy, production of culture, and the formation of identities. Sengupta’s book provides a background to these existing studies.