The enigma around motherhood has produced much interest among feminist scholars who have highlighted social construction of the same. The two books under review, carry forward the feminist tradition with a specific focus on the Indian context.
The troubled, indeed fraught, position of women in India had informed arange of nationalist debates in the nineteenth century, from the age of consent, to sati. Practices such as widow immolation and child marriage were evidence to the British that they did indeed have a civilizing mission among barbaric, tradition-obsessed natives.
Professor Vina Majumdar, one of the grande dames of Indian feminism, was fond of telling the story of the South African MP who visited India in the late eighties. ‘Why do you need a women’s movement when your bureaucrats and you are saying the same things!’ was her tongue-in-cheek comment after a meeting with the Planning Commission.
Call Centres’ entered the Indian market in the late 90s, and since then have been an intriguing space for researchers, considering their crucial position as a conduit of ‘communicative capitalism’. Their success was instant and monumental¬—a quick glimpse into the numbers, in terms of export revenue brought by the Information Technology enable Service (ITeS) industry ($8.4 billion in 2006-7), as well as growth rate and employment (growth rate of 33.5% pa and employment provided to nearly half a million), gives us an estimate of their puissant presence in the Indian market.
The Indian software industry that flourished since the 1990s was central to the effervescent nationalist enthusiasm about the ‘new India’ in the making in the post-liberalization era. Now, we seemingly witness the waning of the industry, and hence it offers a great opportunity for social scientists to examine the Indian ‘software boom’ in its manifold hues. Carol Upadhya provides the readers with a nuanced exploration of the industry through her ethnographically dense analysis in Reengineering India.
One of the protracted conflicts of present times, involving three nuclear powered states, is in the disputed region of Jammu and Kashmir. Both India and Pakistan claim it as part of their larger territorial ambitions and national imaginations. Thus the national projects that assume the task of incorporating the territory do not only rely on explicit political aspects but other subtle, more ideologically driven, aspects negotiate such projects.