Tag Archives: Gender

When globalization, dominant morality and caste clash, it is women who get trampled. Nowhere was this more evident than in the controversy that arose over so-called ‘dance bars’ in Mumbai in the new millennium. These were bars where men drank.

Migration, Gender and Care Economy focuses on the intersections of women’s role and their experiences in migration along with the care economy. Historically we know that women in general have been part of the care economy as unpaid carers and low.

Issues related to women’s mental health have always occupied centre-stage attention. The reasons for this are not hard to find. The lived realities of women’s existence that highlight their subjugation and distress in a patriarchal order have been.

To be single by choice is not seen as choice. A few women I knew were kept single by their fathers so that the salary they brought home could provide for the son’s education. Others were promoted to the status of sons providing for the siblings’ marriages.

Partition, which was not only amongst the most violent events in the history of the Indian subcontinent claiming more than a million lives, remains the largest instance of forced and coerced migration in global history. Nearly five million Hindus crossed India’s eastern border with East Pakistan into the new State of West Bengal and into the States of Assam and Tripura between 1946 and 1964. About a million and a half Muslims left West Bengal, Bihar, Assam and Tripura for East Pakistan.

I wonder whether one is naturally drawn to memoirs, biographies and autobiographies as one goes older. Certainly, among the reader friends of my generation this is a noticeable trend. At a time when the world is changing more rapidly than it has in the last two generations, this genre often records a time that few remember or understand clearly. Soon, it will recede just as surely as our black and white world has been replaced with the distracting charms of the digital records.

From bureaucrat to politician, and from one century to the next, Yashwant Sinha’s is a journey from modest beginnings to the highest corridors of power. In Relentless, he has presented his life and career in a memorable and somewhat lengthy memoir of over 500 pages. But then, he has so much to say. With a Prologue and an Epilogue, the book is divided into eight parts spread over 40 chapters.

The two volumes under review cover a remarkable journey spanning upwards of four decades. They contain a selection of papers from among Devaki Jain’s prolific writings the central theme of which collection being, among other things, not just the interrogation of ‘development’ from a feminist perspective but dissecting ‘development’ itself.

‘This book is for a generation that has very few memories of the Seventies’ India.’ This is the opening line of the preface of Kumkum Chadha’s new book The Marigold Story: Indira Gandhi & Others, comprising eleven profiles of personalities largely belonging to the world of politics and stardom. The basic idea is to make the present generation aware of the human side of these larger than life personalities with all their weaknesses and vulnerabilities.

Besharam: Of Love and Other Bad Behaviours by Priya Alika Elias is a guidebook about what it means to young Indian women and how actually to be one. The author writes it from her perspective of having lived across various countries and how multiple locations for an Indian woman actually don’t simplify the expectations around her. The book has been divided into eight sections demarcated over sex, ugliness, love, hurt, culture, failure, judgement and independence.

Aslam’s book is an exploration of how the lives of Arab Muslim women are influenced by culture, law, religion, patriarchy, contingencies of global restructuring and its accompanying socio- economic shifts. She employs feminism and travelling theory to challenge the (re)Orientalist myths about Arab women’s supposedly exotic lives as well as indigenous structures of patriarchal domination. She argues that the lives of Arab women are marked by heterogeneity…

This volume edited by Uwe Skoda and Birgit Lettmann is a significant contribution to understanding the visual media.  It moves away from the approach taken by Gayatri Sinha in a previous book published in 2009 called Art and Visual Culture in India, 1857-2007 which primarily located visual culture within art and art history. Skoda and Lettmann’s edited volume…

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.

Pramila Venkateswaran is ‘one of our finest diaspora poets’, declares Keki Daruwala. This collection enhances that point. The poet laureate of Suffolk County, Long Island from 2013 to 2015, Venkateswaran has already six collections of poems to her credit. The Singer of Alleppey creates a viewpoint on feminism for the readers. It avoids all pitfalls of direct winging and rhetoric in the true discipline of art.

Sadia Abbas’s debut novel, The Empty Room, is a diligently crafted piece of work that details the intricacies of the life of a married woman in Pakistan. The character-driven story unfolds in Karachi between the years 1969 and 1979, a period of immense political tension in the country, and in the author’s own words, ‘one of the most turbulent times that the country witnessed.’ Four regimes came into power during this tumultuous time and the country was steeped in civil war.

Even before its release, a leaked manuscript of Reham Khan’s book attracted legal notices in June from four persons featured in her narrative, and threats to sue her for defamation from Jemima Goldsmith, Imran Khan’s first wife. The book cover has the words ‘Reham Khan’ printed in large letters below a photograph of a striking woman, lightly made-up, her brown hair half-covered with a dupatta.

It was in 1990 when Cynthia Enloe coined the one-word phrase ‘womenandchildren’ to bring forth how women always figured in war narratives as those needing protection, portrayed merely as victims. That women were equal participants in the society, equally navigating through the complex terrains of war and conflict, was something that male-centric discourses conveniently ignored. In case of the Kashmir conflict as well, the portrayal of women has largely been confined to that of victims.

In recent years, there is growing emphasis in feminist writing on looking at the relation between patriarchal control and women’s relationship with space. How women experience and negotiate physical spaces in everyday life has been shown to have a critical link with gender relations. Public spaces in India, specifically after incidents like the ‘Delhi Gang Rape’ of 2012, have been seen as inevitable sites of violence against women…

It is a universally acknowledged fact that there is a discernible overt or covert ‘difference’ between the writing of men and that of women. Initially, after women became literate and thereafter educated, they began writing about their own lives as lived histories, recording the micro-politics of daily living in their memoirs, diaries and letters. That women would opt for life-writing or autobiographies as the preferred literary genre to any other was inevitable according to Virginia Woolf, as women’s lives were ones of confinement within the domestic.

Here is a book that uses dance, very specifically the dance of the courtesan as presented by Hindi cinema to theorize and discuss a range of very important issues in contemporary India. It is an outstanding example of interdisciplinary scholarship. The book cuts across cinema studies, dance in Hindi films, Urdu and Hindi literature, gender and sexuality studies, politics, history and sociology to name just a few of the disciplinary locations that this book could easily occupy.