The experience of the women’s movement throughout the world has led to an increasingly critical engagement with legal discourse. In many systems the substance, structure and culture of the law are actively discriminatory to women denying them equal rights. Even in areas where there is de jure equality, the de facto position of women is far from equal because of the way all the actors involved interpret laws.
“The Constitution, it may be mistakenly believed, represents a break with India’s colonial past. What is perhaps true is that it could have been a point of departure from colonial priorities and practice. But the pragmatism that characterized executive decision-making and functioning, and the continuity that dogged the legal and judicial system, turned the Constitution on its head, entrenching distortions that stayed with the system through what should have been an era of change. It should have been plain, we may think, that rights of the people and wrongs of the government ought to be consonant with the expectations that the freedom struggle fostered in us; but when it is the letter of the law interpreted through the lens of precedent set by colonial courts which determines the course that is set for us, there is evidence that the relevant past of the freedom struggle has been wilfully relegated to a zone that is ruled by amnesia. And with that historical background absent from the understanding and interpretation of the Constitution, it is no surprise that “the institutions under the Constitution were looked upon as a continuation of the colonial system of administration”(p. 22).
An easily accessible history of Indian Christianity was much needed, and Fernando and Gispert-Sauch’s work supplies this deficiency. The work describes concisely, but with care and scholarly acumen, the long history of the religion in India: from the legends of the first arrival of the message of Jesus Christ in India with St Thomas in the first century AD to recent debates about the place of Christianity in the modern Indian state.
There are many streams of discussions that are going on within political sociology. Development, democracy and participatory governance is one such stream. The nation-state, civil society and social movements is another stream. The ongoing discourse within the realm of political sociology about nation, civil society and social movements highlight the place and role of the nation, civil society and state in the lives of citizens of a nation and the members of a society.
The entire collection of essays in this volume is a modest reverberation of the debates that one has been trying to tackle over the last four decades in the field of Lesbian and Gay studies, yet, the most striking part of these twenty-six essays, collected in this handbook, is their contemporaneity. The ideas and debates tackled through these essays are indicative of ever new grounds that are being approached by Lesbian and Gay studies as a distinctive field of study in the social sciences today. Whether it be the idea of exploring a “queer cyber space” (pp. 115-145) or talk about the “cultural visibility” of a minority homosexual population vis-à-vis their political freedom as “sexual citizens” of a nation state (p p. 183-199, 231-253, 427-443) or thwart basic stated assumptions of defining one’s identity and status through the norms of heteronormativity (pp.73-83, 253-271). The underlying thematic of almost all these essays, I would say, undertakes a social approach to sexuality, where basic assumptions of what constitutes the social have been challenged and new paradigms have been suggested.
I would like to pose a simple question—what does it mean to study sexuality—before discussing Srivasatava’s edited volume on ‘sexualities’, ‘masculinities’ and culture in South Asia. Is the category of sexuality the same within the theoretical apparatuses of anthropology, history or literature? Does it include only sexual ideologies, practices, patterns and norms, or does it necessarily extend to gender relations, constructions of masculinity and femininity?