CWDS Library - Recent Additions

Author     :    Ashwini Tambe

Publisher   :  Zubaan

Year          :  2009

Pages        :  179

Contents    :   Abbreviations.   Introduction: Prostitution and the Law in Bombay.   The Colonial State, Law, and Sexuality.   A Failed Experiment? : The Contagious Diseases Acts in Bombay.   Racial Stratification and the Discourse of Trafficking.   Akootai's Death : Subaltern Indian Brothel Workers.  Abolition and Nationalism.  Conclusion:  The Failed Promise of Laws : Contemporary Reflections.  Acknowledgements.  Chronology of Laws Relevant to Prostitution.  Notes.  Bibliography.  Index..

This remarkable study focuses on the relationship between forms of prostitution, discourses on law making, and law enforcement practices.

 

Across the 19th and early 20th centuries, the colonial government in Bombay city formulated laws on prostitution that were enormously repetitive. Activities such as soliciting men, pimping and procuring women and girls for prostitution were banned in identical ways in multiple eras. Across the same hundred years, commercial sex grew vast in scale, and Bombay became a node in a transnational sex trade circuit.

 

This book argues that while the expansion of Bombay's sex trade over the past century might suggest that laws were simply ineffectual, law making was instead a productive process that sustained particular forms of prostitution. In examining this dimension of colonial governance, Tambe evaluates the uses and limits of Foucault's approach to law and sexuality.

 

Tambe demonstrate that regulation and criminalization of prostitution were not contrasting state approaches to prostitution, as is often assumed, but rather, different facets of state coercion   [from the back cover] 

Author      :    Vandana Joshi

Publisher  :    Palgrave

Year         :    2003

Pages      :     229

Contents    :    List of Tables.  Preface.  Introduction.  Methodology and Sources.   The 'Private' Became 'Public': Wives as Denouncers in the Realm of the Family.   Fishing in Troubled Waters? Gender Perspectives on Denouncers and Their Jewish Victims.   Faces of Gender Oppression: the 'Aryan' Interface with 'Racially Foreign' Workers.  Conclusion.  Notes.  Bibliography.  Index.








 

In the last decade a considerable amount of work has been done to demystify the Gestapo, which, far from being omniscient, depended heavily on unsolicited denunciations of 'deviants and dissenters'. A substantial number of these denunciations were sent in by ordinary women. So far no one has thought to ask why."

"This is the first book to attempt to provide an answer. It explores those spaces within the patriarchal, sexist and racist power structures of the regime that women appropriated, by articulating and resolving their varied conflicts through denunciations. It questions the victim-vs-perpetrator paradigm within which studies on denunciation have hitherto been cast, and instead argues for a more nuanced, differentiated approach. It also places structures of male sexual aggression alongside those of female aggression towards 'community aliens'."

The intensive and unique treatment of individual cases from Gestapo files in Gender and Power in the Third Reich makes visible for the first time. How female denouncers responded to the Nazi state and their deeply politicized surroundings. And finally it relates denunciatory behaviour to broader issues of female dissent from and consent to Nazi Germany.  [from the back cover]

Title          :   Othappu: The Scent of the Other Side

Author      :    Sarah Joseph

Publisher  :    Oxford University Press

Year          :   2009

Pages        :   286

Contents   :      Author’s Note.  Translator’s Note.  Introduction.  Kinship Terms.  Othappu.  Glossary.  Many Meanings of ‘Othappu’.  Sarah Joseph and Githa Hariharan: A Dialogue

 

This transfiguring work opens with Sister Margalitha leaving the Convent in search of God. When she decides to live with Karikkan, a priest who has abandoned his vocation, she offends her family, society, the Church, and the law. The scandal rocks Thrissur, and the couple become social outcasts.

Othappu, the first Malayalam novel of its kind, is about a woman’s yearning for a true understanding of spirituality and her own sexuality. The novel is a powerful indictment of the hypocrisy that plagues Christianity in many parts of the Subcontinent. Othappu unfolds at many levels to critique notions of class, caste, antiquity, and prestige that have, over time, eroded the power of the first Church.

The detailed Introduction by Jancy James provides rare insights into the work and skillfully sketches the social history of Kerala, the location of the novel. Two special inclusions— Paul Zacharia on the different meanings of ‘othappu’ and a dialogue between the author and Githa Hiranyan—lend fresh perspectives to the work.

With its strong social message, this novel will appeal to students and scholars of Indian writing in translation, comparative literature, gender and cultural studies, as well as general readers  [from the back cover]

Title          :    States of Trauma: Gender and Violence in South Asia

Author      :     Piya Chatterjee, Manali Desai and Parama Roy (eds.)

Publisher  :     Zubban

Year         :     2009

Pages       :    342

Contents :     Acknowledgments.   Introduction: Enigmas of Violence.  The State, Law, and Women’s Studies:   The Bigamous Body of India’s Bandit Queen: Corporeality and the Arithmetic of the Law.  Understanding Sirasgaon: Notes Towards Conceptualizing the  Role of Law, Caste and Gender in  a Case of  “Atrocity”.  The Narrative Appropriation of Saima: Coercion and Consent in Muslim Pakistan.  Trauma, Witnessing, Resentment:  Testimonies of State Terror: Trauma and Healing in Naxalbari.  Abducted Identities: Pakistan, its Partition and its Abducted Women.  Lost in Violence: History, Memory, and Humanity in 1971, East Pakistan.  Tracing Absent Presence.  Women, Borders, Violence:  Reflecting on Resistance: Hindu Women ‘Soldiers and the Birth of Female Militancy.  A History of Violence: Gender, Power, and the Making of the 2002: Pogrom in Gujarat.  ‘A Family’s Shame Made Flash’ : Shame, Violence, and the Body in Salman Rushdie’s Shame.  Notes on Contributors.

In the last couple of decades, violence as an analytic category has loomed large in the historical, literary, and anthropological scholarship of South Asia. The challenge of thinking violence in its gendered incarnations fully and in all its complexity is not only theoretical or critical but also irreducibly ethical and political, given the proliferation of civil wars, pogroms and riots, fundamentalist movements, insurgencies and counterinsurgencies, and new technologies of violence and injury. All of these simultaneously feature and help constitute gendered actors and gendered scripts of violence.

States of Trauma seeks to examine this terrain by staging a set of questions. How are we to think about the moral charge that accrues to violence? What is the relationship between violence and non-violence? In considering the moral and affective economy of violence, how may we speak of the seductions of the idioms and practices of militarism and sexualized violence for women? How are these seductions/pleasures distinct from those proffered to men, if indeed they are distinct?

These are some of the many questions that the essays here-that range from addressing the gendered violence of 1947 to the subalternization of the ‘bandit queen’ Phoolan devi-seek to address.  [from the back cover]

Title           :   The Trauma and the Triumph:
                     Gender and Partition in Eastern India

Author       :    Jasodhara Bagchi, Subhoranjan Dasgupta
                      with Subhasri Ghosh (eds.)

Publisher   :    Stree

Year          :    2009

Contents : Acknowledgements. Introduction. I. Short Stories: 1. Riot. 2. Hearth and Home. 3. Dialectic. 4. The Woman Who Sold Wares. 5. Biological. 6.The Restless Sannyasi. II. Reminiscences: 7. Women Become Breadwinners. 8. Grandmother. 9. Wandering Through Different Spaces. 10. From Partition to Liberation and Thereafter. 11. Kaloibibi: a Leader of the Nankars. III. Interviews: 12. Voices form the other side: i. Sultana Farooq Sobhan. ii. Taiyeba Ahmed. iii. Nazara Huq. iv. Sunanda Ghosh. v. Kishwar Jahan. vi. Naseema Dey. IV. Screenplay: 13. Way Back Home. V. From the Field: 14. Forgotten Voices form the P.L. Camps. 15. Voices from Two Villages. 16. Unravelling the Past: Remembering the Communal Violence of 1950 in Hooghly. VI. Documentary Evidence: 16. Communal Tension in Bengal and the Riots of 1946. 17. Assembly Proceedings. 18. Mridula Sarabhai, Report on Communal Situation and Riots in Calcutta in 1950. Bibliography. List of Editors and Contributors. Index.

"The Trauma and the Triumph, Volume 2, continues the discussion on partition in the eastern region, focusing more fully on both East Bengal and West Bengal. The editors have been guided by the intention 'to incorporate as much of the Muslim voices and experiences often taking place on the other side of the divide, that is, erstwhile East Pakistan or present-day Bangladesh'. They have also called attention to the lives of some Muslim women residing in West Bengal.Countering the critique that the eastern partition has not been adequately reflected in creativity, in contrast to what one finds on the traumatic experiences of the western partition of the Punjab, the editors raise the pertinent question of whether such representation could be measured at all. They refer to Günter Grass's comment that instead of asking whether literature could capture the demonic nature of the Holocaust, people should 'preserve and evaluate what has been produced'.
The editors suggest this holds true for our partition literature too.Part I begins with short stories from both sides of the border, that share common themes of grief and conflict. Part II presents reminiscences that support the narrative of the short stories, offering an account of survival struggles' of a grandmother's desperate flight to safety, of the reflections on space and identity, of the migration of a woman (born in a Hindu family) from Kolkata to East Pakistan to Kolkata, and then to Canada.  Two thought-provoking pieces are situated wholly in East Pakistan: on a Hindu professor and his family's decision to remain in Dhaka, witness to the later war of liberation. The second is an account of Kaloibibi, the remarkable woman leader of the Nankar Rebellion, in Sylhet, 1949-50.The interviews capture the intricate nature of migration and of non-migration, covering Hindus who moved from East Bengal, Muslims of West Bengal who moved to East Pakistan and those who chose to remain. Part IV presents a screenplay of an elderly couple who return to their old home in Bangladesh, utilizing aspects of remembrance to construct its own cinematic narrative, underlain by 'the quest for regeneration and redemption'. Part V takes the reader to interviews in the permanent liability camps that still hold the original refugees of partition, dwelling on the implications of the failures of state policy. Of special interest is the study from two villages where the voices of the women of the minority community can be clearly heard. Finally, Part VI offers extracts from state documents, 1946-57, on the themes of communal violence, of the abduction of women, and their rehabilitation.
Presenting hitherto unavailable writings, this volume makes a valuable contribution towards the understanding of partition in the eastern region.".  [from the back cover]

Title           :   Wives, Widows and Concubines:
                     The Conjugal Family Ideal in Colonial India

Author       :    Mytheli Sreenivas

Publisher   :    Orient BlackSwan

Year          :     2009

Pages        :    169

Contents    :  Acknowledgements. Note on transliteration. 1. Introduction: situating families. 1. Colonizing the family: kinship, household, and state. 2. Conjugality and capital: defining women's rights to family property. 3. Nationalizing marriage: Indian and Dravidian politics of conjugality. 4. Marrying for love: emotion and desire in women's print culture. Conclusion: families and history. Notes. Bibliography. Index.

"Based on archival research on the Tamil speaking region of Southern India, Wives, Widows and Concubines investigates the emergence of the family as a site of intense ideological ferment under the conditions of late colonial rule. During this period, intimate aspects of marriage practice -- ranging from the emotional compatibility of husband and wife to the caste politics of choosing a spouse -- became targets for public dispute and debate. Sreenivas demonstrates that this public discourse about families was the most visible manifestation of a broader historical shift in the Tamil region, whereby the conjugal relationship increasingly displaced the extended Patrilineal Kin Group as the normative centre of family relations. 

Emerging earliest among professional and mercantile elites seeking to reform colonial property relations, and fuelled by the feminist and anti-caste politics of nationalist movements, this emphasis on conjugality took numerous, sometimes contradictory, forms. On the one hand, conjugality provided a language with which women laid claim to a host of rights -- from the right to inherit a deceased husband's property to the right to seek emotional and sexual fulfillment in marriage. On the other hand, appeals to conjugality also served to reinscribe women's oppression both inside and outside marriage. Mapping this complex history in relation to the culture, politics and economy of the Tamil region, the book opens new arenas of inquiry about the family and colonial modernity in South Asia. 

Recipient of the Joseph W. Elder Prize in the Indian Social Sciences from The American Institute of Indian Studies, this book will be of special interest to historians of modern South Asia as well as anthropologists, sociologists with an interest in women and gender.".  [from the back cover]

Title           :   Women, Gender and Disaster:
                     Global Issues and Initiatives

Author       :    Elaine Enarson and P G Dhar Chakrabarti (eds.)

Publisher   :    Sage 

Year          :    2009

Pages        :    380  

Contents : List of Tables, Figures and Boxes. Foreword. Preface. Part One: Understanding Gender Relations in Disaster-- Overview. Sex, Gender and Gender Relations in Disasters. A Gender Perspective on Disaster Risk Reduction. Let's Share the Stage: 'Involving Men in Gender Equality and Disaster Risk Reduction'. Organizing for Risk Reduction: The Honolulu Call to Action. Part Two: Gendered Challenges and Responses in Disasters—Overview. Reducing Disaster Risk through Community Resilience in the Himalayas. Gender Perspectives on Disaster Reconstruction in Nicaragua: Reconstructing Roles and Relations?. Environmental Management and Disaster Mitigation: Middle Eastern Gender Perspective. "Everything Became a Struggle, Absolute Struggle": Post-flood Increases in Domestic Violence in New Zealand. Parenting in the Wake of Disaster: Mothers and Fathers Respond to Hurricane. Women in the Great Hanshin Earthquake. Victims of Earthquake and Patriarchy: The 2005 Pakistan Earthquake. "A Part of Me Had Left: " Learning from Women Farmers in Canada about Disaster Stress. Supporting Women and Men on the Front Lines of Biological Disaster. Part Three: Women’s Organised Initiatives—Overview. We Can Make Things Better for Each Other': Women and Girls Organize to Reduce Disasters in Central America. Women's Participation in Disaster Relief and Recovery. Work-focused Responses to Disasters: India's Self Employed Women's Association. A Climate for Change: Humanitarian Disaster and the Movement for the Commons in Kenya. Sri Lankan Women's Organizations Responding to Post-tsunami Violence. 'A We Run Tings': Women Rebuilding Montserrat. Women Responding to Drought in Brazil. Part Four: Gender Sensitive Disaster Risk Reduction—Overview. Balancing Gender Vulnerabilities and Capacities in the Framework of Comprehensive Risk Management: The Case of Mexico. Towards Gender Equality in Climate Change Policy: Challenges and Perspectives for the Future. Engendering Tsunami Recovery in Sri Lanka: The Role of Unifem and its Partners. Gendering Disaster Risk Reduction: 57 Steps from Words to Action. Toolkit for Mainstreaming Gender in Emergency Response. About the Editors and Contributors. Index.

Women, Gender and Disaster: Global Issues and Initiatives examines gender within the context of disaster risk management. It argues for gender mainstreaming as an effective strategy towards achieving disaster risk reduction and mitigating post-disaster gender disparity. Highlighting that gender inequalities pervade all aspects of life, it analyses the failure to implement inclusive and gender-sensitive approaches to relief and rehabilitation work. While examining positive strategies for change, the collection focuses on women's knowledge, capabilities, leadership and experience in community resource management. The authors emphasize that these strengths in women, which are required for building resilience to hazards and disasters, are frequently overlooked.

This timely book will be extremely useful to policy makers and professionals active in the field of disaster management and to academics and students in gender studies, social work, environmental studies and development studies.  [from the back cover]

Author     :   Mangai Natarajan

Publisher :   Ashgate

Year       :    2008

Pages     :   228

Contents   :     List of Figures, Map and Diagram.  List of Tables.  Preface.  Part I.  Women Police Worldwide:  1. Women Police and Societal Change.  2. Three Decades of Research on Women Police: What Has Been Learned?.   Part II.  Women Police in a Traditional Society:  3. Women Police in India. 4. Women Police in Tamil Nadu.  Part III. Studies of Women Police in Tamil Nadu:  5. Tamil Nadu Women Police in the 1980s.  6.  Tamil Nadu All Women Police Units – An Assessment.  7.  Women Police in the Battalions.   Part IV.  Women Policing in a Changing Society:  8. Reconciling the Needs of the Police, Women Officers and Tamil Nadu.  9.  Prescriptions for 21st Century Women Policing: Theory, Research and Policy.   Bibliography.   Index.

Offering a fascinating account of the development of women police over the past twenty years, this book refers to the author's extended research in India to examine how the Indian experience demonstrates a valuable alternative to the Anglo-American model; not only for traditional societies but for women police in the West as well. With reference to the establishment in 1992 of all-women units in Tamil Nadu, this unique experiment proved highly successful in enhancing the confidence and professionalism of women officers and ensuring the effectiveness and efficiency of the police. At a time when policing is being rethought all over the world, not only in traditional societies, the Tamil Nadu practice illustrates important lessons for western countries that are finding it increasingly difficult to recruit and retain women officers.

Natarajan's remarkable book is an important and original contribution to the literature on gendered policing, which to date has concentrated almost exclusively on the US and British experience. [from the back cover]

Title          : Women Rebels: Stories From Nepal And Nagaland

Author       : Anuradha Dutta and Triveni Goswami Vernal

Publisher   : Akansha

Year          : 2009

Contents  :   Preface.  Acknowledgements.  Glossary of Terms.  1. Introduction.  2. Governance and Assertions of Identity: Reading through the Histories of Nepal and India.  3. Women, Patriarchy and Rebellion.  4. A Closer Look.  5. Conclusion.  Annexures.  Photo Plates.  Bibliography.  Index.

The book Women Rebels: Stories from Nepal and Nagaland is an attempt to explore and create a better understanding of the phenomenon of women rebels. Often cloaked in mystery, women rebels have ignited the popular imagination for time immemorial. The book is a product of a journey, spread over two years, into Nepal and Nagaland-both, home to rebel outfits with a strong presence of women in their rank and file. The study was undertaken to generate an understanding of what motivated dynamic, young women to leave their hearth and home and join the rebel ranks of the People's Liberation Army (PLA) in Nepal and the National Socialist Council of Nagalim (NSCN) in Nagaland, India. Although the two contexts presented a contrast, both were steeped in a rich tapestry of historical and cultural traditions. This, in turn, shaped the experiences and essence of the women rebels located in the two contexts. The book has tried to raise significant questions regarding the situatedness of women in the society, their expectations and the inter-linkages with the all pervasive, patriarchal framework  [from the back cover]

Home     |     CWDS Library     |     Library - Recent Additions