Women and Family Structure

This volume is a collection of 14 papers covering Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan in the north, Maharashtra in the central and old South Travancore in south India. The papers are organized in VI parts. Part I is composed of four papers which deal with Khalapur in western Uttar Pradesh – the first two are about Chuhras during 1950s and the second two draw from later fieldwork undertaken in 1984 with a gap of about thirty years. These studies together deal with former untouchables with reference to sweeper women’s experiences with the practice of mandatory levirate as well as the sweeper men’s risqué humour that questions traditional system of purdah and turn it upside down. The latter two papers in this section are essentially concerned with changing caste ideology and other social practices, i.e., child mortality in Khalapur over recent decades and seek to explain that decline.