CWDS Library - Recent Additions

2008: January-February; March; April

Author       :      Radhika Coomaraswamy and Ninanthi
                        Perera-Rajasingham (eds.)

Publisher   :       Women Unlimited

Year          :      2008

Pages        :      260

Contents    :      Introduction.   1.  Gendered Violence, National Boundaries and Culture.   2.  Trafficking: Crossing Borders in an era of Globalisation.   3.  Transcultural Judgements: Violence and the Question of Prostitution in Nepal.   4.  The Gender and Spatial Politics of NGOs: Spaces of Subversion, Sites of Reinforcement.   5.  The Politics of the Governed: Material Politics and Child Recruitment in the Eastern Province of Sri Lanka.   6.  Mapping Women’s Agency: On Violence, Difference and Silence in a Village in Southern Punjab, Pakistan.   7..Missing Niche Audiences and Underground Views on Sexual and Gender-Based Violence in Sri Lanka.    8.  Reclaiming Spaces: Gender Politics on a University Campus.   Contributors.

This volume gathers together some reflections on the complex and shifting dynamic of violence and gender in South Asia. It analyses how international catalytic efforts actually function in the matrix of South Asian societies, and critiques their silences and erasures. Has the international movement, in its conceptualization, articulation and implementation, resulted in privileging one body of experience over another and erased the reality of many women subjected  to different kinds of violence?. These essays raise important concerns of difference and plurality in understanding and confronting violence against women, and interrogate accepted truths on development and agency, to flesh out nuances previously ignored. [from the back cover] 

Author       :     Louise Brown

Publisher   :     Fourth Estate

Year          :     2005

Pages        :     311

Contents    :     Prologue.   1.  “We Were Artists….Not Gandi Kanjari”.    2.  A Prostitute with Honor.    3.  “Big Love Big Money”.   4.  Ankle Bells and Shia Blades.   5.  Child Bride of a Monsoon Wedding.    6.  Dancing Daughters.    7.  Old Ways: New Fortunes.   8.  Pakeezah-Pure Heart.   Afterword.    Glossary of Urdu and Punjabi Words.    Index.
 

The Dancing Girls of Lahore inhabit the Diamond Market in the shadow of a great mosque. The twenty-first century goes on outside the walls of this ancient quarter but scarcely registers within. Through their trade can be described with accuracy as prostitution, the dancing girls have an illustrious history. Beloved by emperors and nawabs, their sophisticated art encompassed the best of Mughal culture. The modern-day Bollywood aesthetic, with its love of gaudy spectacle, music and dance, is their distant legacy. But the life of the pampered courtesan is not the one  now being lived by Maha and her three girls. What they do is forbidden by Islam, through tolerated, but they are gandi, “unclean” and Maha’s daughters, like her are born into the business and will not leave it.

Sociologist Louise Brown spent four years in the most intimate study of the family life of a Lahori dancing girl. With beautiful understatement, she turns a novelist’s eye on a true story that baggers the imagination. Maha, a classically trained dancer of exquisite grace, had her virginity sold to a powerful Arab sheikh at the age of twelve; when her own daughter Nene comes of age and Maha cannot bring in the money she once did, she faces a terrible decision as the agents of the sheikh come calling once more.   [from the back cover]

Author       :       Renu Addlakha

Publisher   :       Zubaan

Year         :      2008

Pages       :      330

Contents   :     Acknowledgements.   Introduction.   Part One.  Ethnography of Psychiatry.   Chapter 1.  Psychiatric Practice: Interface between Medicine, Culture, and Society.  Chapter 2.  The Inside-Outside Continuum in Treatment and the Hospital-Family Alliance.   Chapter 3.  Spectrum of Abnormally: Biology, Culture, and Language.   Part Two.   Women as Subjects of Psychiatry.   Chapter 4.  Women and Mental Disorder: A Short Literature Review.   Chapter 5.  Natality and Mental Illness: Social Scripts and Female Subjectivities.   Chapter 6.  Conjugality and Mental Illness: Poetics and Politics of Marriage and Domesticity.   Conclusion.   References.

Drawing from feminist, post modern, cultural and sociological literature, this work shows the complex inter twining of illness and culture in the context of mental disorder.

The ethnographic context of the study is the interface between mental hralth professionals, patients and their families in a local psychiatric hospital in New Delhi. The book anchors the discussion around feminist thinking and praxis in the mental health realm, along with the traditions of cultural psychiatry and medical anthropology.

Deconstructing mental illness is relevant and contemporary, and makes an important contribution to the field of mental health and women. This important new work extends the frontiers of social science research and offers alternative perspectives on women, health and disability. [from the back cover]

Author        :       Jaya Tyagi

Publisher    :       Orient Longman

Year           :       2008

Pages         :      378

Contents    :     Transliteration.   Abbreviations.   Glossary.   Preface.   Introduction.   1.  The Emergence of the Griha as a Sacred ‘Space’.  2.  The’Sacred’ Activity of Procreation: Marriage, Conception and Birth Rites.  3.  Gender Segregation in the Household: Early Socialisation of Boys and the Separation of Girls from ‘Formal Learning’.  4.  The Griha as a Viable Unit for Production,  Distribution, and Transmission of Resources.  5.  Creating Social Hierarchies and Channeling Linkages through Rituals.   6.  Conclusion.    Bibliography.   Index.

Engendering the early Household is a socio-historical study of the Grhyasutras, which are texts that detail rituals for the household. Compiled after the Vedas and the Bramanas, they represent how Brahmanical ideology came to be consolidated and how varna and gender hierarchies solidified. Using the texts, this book present how the Grhyasutras assimilated and ‘brahmanised’ commonly practiced rituals in a selective manner, highlighting only rituals centred around the household.

Jaya Tyagi’s study of the early Grhyasutras reveals how these texts project the household as a ‘sacred’ space that has two functions—production and reproduction. This book also reveals the deep roots of Brahmanical traditions by studying how grhya rituals seek to ensure the birth of male progeny for the male householder. The Grhyasutras thus project a social construct in which households are to be considered the personal domains of householders, while bramanas function as the custodians of social order through the mechanism of rituals.

Engendering the Early Household is an incisive and well-researched account of the patriarchal biases of Brahmanism and goes even further to shed light on how norms laid down in early Grhyasutras continue, though in varied forms, till date. [from the back cover]

Author       :       Ramya Srinivasan 

Publisher   :       Permanent Black

Year          :       2007

Pages        :       276

Contents    :      Acknowledgements.   Note on Transliteration and Usage.   List of Maps.  1.  Introduction.   2.  Sufi Tale of Rajputs in Sixteenth-Century Avadh.  3.  Rajput  Kings and Their Pasts in the Mughal Period.  4. Tales of Past Glory Under Early Colonial Indirect Rule(c.1750-1850).  5.  Exemplary Patriotism in the late Ninteenth Century.  6.  Conclusion.  7.  Appendix 1. Summaries of Selected Versions of the Legend.  8.  Appendix 2. List of Known Versions/Manuscripts/Editions of the Padmini Legend.   Bibliography.  Index.

This book is centered on the legend of Padmini, the Rajput queen widely believed to have been punished by Alauddin Khilji, Sultan of Delhi. Sreenivasan investigates the many narratives that exist about this heroic queen’s legend in India, ranging from Sufi mystical romances in the sixteenth century to nationalist histories in the late nineteenth century.

The book explores the manner in which early modern regional elites, caste groups, and mystical and monastic communities shaped their distinctive versions of past times through the repeated refashioning of this legend. It then traces the appropriations of these narrations by colonial administrators and nationalist intellectuals for varying political ends.

In the process, the author successfully shows us not only how particular narratives about virtuous women changed and circulated across the communities of South Asia, but also the social and political investments in discourses of gender and history that occurred simultaneously.

This book will interest historians of memory, gender, community, culture, and history-writing in early modern and  modern South Asia.In illustrating how significance legends about the past emerged out of particular pre-colonial repositories of ‘tradition’, the book also contributes to current dabates on the nature of colonial transitions and the nature of pre-colonial historical conciousness. [from the back cover]

Author        :      Rajni Palriwala and Patricia Uberoi (eds.)

Publisher    :     Sage

Year           :     2008

Pages         :     359

Contents     :     Series Introduction.   Acknowledgments.   Section 1.  Introduction.   Section 2.  Marriage as Migration.   Section 3.  Brokering Marriage.   Section 4.  Marriage, Transaction and Transnational Contexts.   Section 5.  The Strains of Marriage Migration.   About the Editors and Contributors.   Index.
 

Marriage, Migration and Gender brings a gender sensitive and comparative perspective to bear on Asian peoples’ migration experiences, both within and across national borders. It seeks to examine how the institution of marriage may effect or enable women’ s and men’s migration, as well as the impact of migration, state laws and immigration procedures on the marriage, family and kinship networks of Asian migrants.

Migration and marriage strategies are discussed through detailed case studies, whether of Filipina(allegedly ‘mail-order’) brides, transnational Tamil Brahmans, Pakistani grooms in the UK, or Malayali women in Italy, illustrating how marriage migration reflects individual as well as family aspirations for spatial and social mobility. The fluid boundaries between matchmaking and trafficking , as of Bangladeshi or Chinese migrant women, and the political economy of marriage transactions among a  range of ‘economic’ migrants-from the Punjab, Andhra Pradesh, and other parts of India-are drawn out. The chapters question conventional dichotomous constructions of emotional versus material considerations in the choice of marriage partner.The implications of migration for original and inter-generational relations, including the increasing distance between natal and marital homes, the intensification of pre-existing socio-cultural faulltines, shifts in culturally normative familial and work roles and the transformation of familial relations have also been addressed.

The chapters in the volume highlight the varied forms of women’s agency in marriage and migration strategies. These range from passive to active resistance and the ability to work for change in normative structures.Simultaneously, attention is drawn to the constraints on and opportunities for women’s and men’s exercise of agency, including politico-economic, processes, historical and symbolic determinations, cultural constructs, and the social embeddedness of personhood.

The contributors are from a variety of disciplines, mostly sociology and social anthropology. Several of them have been activists on the issues that they are write about. The volume will be of interest to sociologists, social anthropologists, scholars interested in migration, gender and labour studies, as well as social workers and activists.[from the back cover]

Title         :       The Prisons We Broke

Author      :       Baby Kamble

Publisher   :       Orient Longman

Year         :       2008 

Pages       :       178

Writing on the lives of the Mahars of Maharashtra, Baby Kamble reclaims memory to locate the Mahar society before it was impacted by Babasaheb Ambedkar, and tells a consequent tale of redemption wrought by a fiery brand of social and self-awareness. The Prisons We Broke provides a graphic insight into the oppressive, caste and patriarchal tenets of the Indian society, but nowhere does the writing descend to self-pity. With verve and colour the narrative brings to life, among other things, the festivals, rituals, superstitions, snot-nosed children, hard lives and hardy women of the Mahar community.

The original Marathi work, Jina Amucha (serialised in 1982 and published as a book in 1986) re-defined autobiographical writing in Marathi in terms of form and narrative strategies adopted, and the selfhood and subjectivities that were articulated. It is the first autobiography by a Dalit woman in Marathi, probably even the first of its kind in any Indian language.  [from the back cover]

Author       :      Meena Dhanda (ed.)

Publisher   :       Women Unlimited

Year          :       2008

Pages        :       390

Contents    :       Series Note.   Acknowledgements.    Introduction.    1.  Historical Background.   2.  Theoretical Issues.   3.  Women as Policy Makers.   4.  Alternatives to the Women’s Reservation Bill.   Contributors.


 

This collection of essays and excerpts brings together, for the first time, a range of writings on the issue of affirmative action for increasing the presence of women in Parliament and legislative assemblies in India. A comprehensive coverage of the debate from historical, theoretical, practical, and political perspectives locates the discussions in India within the larger global context. The proposals discussed range from the reservation of seats in Parliament through quotas in party lists, to double-member constituencies. Analyses of women’s experience as policy-makers in local government following the 73^rd and 74^th Amendments to the Indian Constituation suggest reasons for extending legal measures to ensure the greater participation of women in Parliament. This book is invaluable to all those interested in the cause of women’s enhanced representation in formal politics. [from the back cover]

Author       :  Ferdous Jahan

Publisher   :  South Asian

Year          :  2008 

Pages        :  262

Contents  :     Preface.  1.  Introduction.   2.  Retributive versus Restorative Justice : The Theoretical Debate.  3.  Bangladesh and West Bengal, India: One Geography, One Language and One Culture But Two Polities.  4.  Demographic, Economic, and Social Characteristics of Victims.  5.  Procedural, Distributive and Compliance Power Evaluated.  6.  Lives of Twelve Victims Revisited.   Conclusion. Appendix: A victim interview questionnaire.   Bibliography.   Index.
 

"This book draws on theoretical debate as well as empirical evidences from political science and criminology to understand women's legal empowerment and justice seeking behavior. It attempts to understand theories of equality and empowerment through a practical lens. Based on in-depth ethnographic interviews, the book investigates which of four legal/alternative dispute resolution institutions (formal courts, indigenous traditional dispute resolution structures, Lok Adalat, and Non-Governmental Organization sponsored dispute resolution structures) best empower women in South Asia who are victims of domestic violence. It explores the extent of procedural power or the direct participation of female victims in procedures of justice processes; distributive power which is the restitution or protection of women through the results of justice processes; and compliance power or the desistence of defendants in each case from further crimes against female victims and the realization of conference resolutions and/or court verdicts. The book concludes that empowerment must be considered on both an institutional level (how an institution is designed) and leadership of the institution (who leads and influences decisions). Finally, it argues for a culturally sensitive and viable restorative justice model with female facilitators and attendees to ensure justice and satisfaction from a victim's perspective."  [from the back cover]

Home     |     CWDS Library     |     Library - Recent Additions