The historian Ramchandra Guha had once observed that two of the things that keep India together are cricket and Bollywood. If one were to think of a third unifying element it would undoubtedly be the national election. However, despite its pan-India appeal and its consistency in attracting wide public participation, it is surprising that the national election in India has not received the kind of nuanced attention that it deserves.
The book under review may appear as an ambitious project. What the authors attempt to address here is the complex puzzle of Indian democracy through their multi-modal enquiries into questions of gender and representation. True to their ambitions, these worthwhile attempts have led to a distinct contribution to the contemporary debates on gender and politics in India and elsewhere.
The suffrage movement marks a watershed in the history of women’s movements and continues to inspire feminist contestations across the world. However, all forms of delineations and depictions on the suffrage movement, whether in academia or popular culture, exclusively focus on the role and struggles of the women in the West. In her extensively researched work, Indian Suffragettes…
Way back in 1985, I got a call from an agitated lawyer friend. He wanted me to mobilize opinion against the newly passed Administrative Tribunals Act, which took away the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court and the High Courts over service disputes of public servants, and vested it in administrative tribunals. The power of constitutional courts was being handed over to statutory tribunals, which did not even need to have judicial members on the bench.
Rehman’s book aims to document the landmark event of the Kangla protest, as well as its political and personal aftermath, through the voices of the twelve Manipuri women who took part in it. It is true that the twelve activists, otherwise known as the twelve imas (meaning ‘mothers’ in the Manipuri language), have spoken numerous times and at length to journalists, researchers and scholars about their experiences in the years following 2004.
Ambalika Guha has produced an excellent study on the powerful interplay between colonialism, nationalism, modernity, medicine and midwifery in colonial Bengal (c. 1860-1947). Unlike the dominant scholarship in the field, Guha emphasizes the roles that both male and female doctors, and not female doctors alone, played at the pedagogic and interventionist levels respectively in the development of midwifery and obstetrics in Bengal…