CWDS Library - Recent Additions

Title          :    Between Democracy & Nation: Gender and
                     Militarization in Kashmir

Author       :   Seema Kazi

Publisher   :   Women Unlimited

Year          :   2009

Pages        :   222

Contents    :     Preface.  Introduction.  1. Militarism and Militarization.  2. Militarization and the Indian State.  3. Militarization and Kashmir.  4. Gender and Militarization in Kashmir.  5. Conclusion.  Bibliography.

This book focuses on the militarization of a secessionist movement involving Kashmiri militants and Indian military forces in Jammu and Kashmir. In contrast to the conventional approaches that distinguish between inter- and intra-state military conflict, this analysis of India’s external and domestic crises of militarization is located within a single analytic frame: it argues that both dimensions have common political origins.

                                                
Highlighting the intersection between the two the author argues that the heaviest and the most grievous price of using the military for domestic repression and for the defense of Kashmir is paid by Kashmir’s citizens and society. Drawing on women’s subjective experience of militarization, she examines the relationship between state military processes at the national level and social transformations at the local/societal level.

 By way of conclusion, she maintains that Kashmir's humanitarian tragedy — exemplified by its gender dimensions-underlines has failed either to ensure 'security for the state, or security and justice for Kashmiris. A decentralized, democratic state with a plural concept of nation and identity, she believes, is the best safeguard against using the military for domestic repression within, and extraordinary military and nuclear consolidation of the Indian state.  [from the back cover] 

Title           :   Displaced by Development: Confronting Marginalization
   and Gender Injustice
 

Author       :    Lyla Mehta (ed.)

Publsher    :    Sage

Year          :    2009 

Pages        :    309

Contents    :     List of Tables. List of Boxes.  Forwarded by Medha Patkar.  Preface. Introduction by Lyla Mehta.  I. Locating gender in processes of displacement.  II. Policies, programmes and the state.  III. Gendered struggles against displacement. About the editor and contributors.  Index.

This compilation is a rare attempt to apply gender analysis to development-induced-displacement and resettlement in the Indian context. It brings together leading scholar-activists, researchers and contributors from people's movements to critique and draw attention to the injustices perpetrated during such processes. Facing up to the need to focus specifically on how displacement and resettlement affect social groups differently with regard to axes such as gender, class, caste and tribe, the articles show that disenfranchised groups are deemed dispensable and tend to be affected the most, and that women and children among them suffer disproportionately.

Displaced by Development : Confronting Marginalization and Gender Injustice argues that without differentiated analyses and programmes, displacement and resettlement will continue to intensify and perpetuate gender and social injustice. This work will hold the interest of a wide readership and will be a crucial source of information for those working in the areas of Gender and social policy, economics and development studies, sociology of gender, environment and development, migration studies, anthropology, and South Asian Studies. It will also interest policy makers in development agencies, activists and non-governmental organizations concerned with forced displacement and migration issues." [from the back cover]

Title           :   Female Adolescent Workers: Faceless and Fateless

Author       :    Ayub Khan and Sumita Ayub

Publsher    :    Anamika

Year          :    2009 

Pages        :    157

Contents    :     Foreword.  Preface.  1. Introduction.  2. The Unorganised Sector.  3. Psycho-Social Aspects of Female Adolescents.  4. Situation of Female Adolescent Workers in the Hazardous Occupations.  5. Conclusions.   Bibliography.  Index.

Female Adolescent Workers: Faceless and Fateless brims with new insight into the under-explored psycho-social situation of female adolescent workers in the unorganized sector. The book is an outcome of intensive inter-disciplinary study of the milieu of female adolescent workers who neither get privileges related to child-labour nor could be considered female workers. On the one hand, being in the formative period, these girls face biological, social and psychological changes and challenges on the other hand they are forced to work in the most hazardous and exploitative working conditions. This book attempts to focus on factual accounts of their problems, whether it is socio-economic, psychological or health related. It also explores their dreams, job satisfaction and aspirations. All these facts have been scientifically expressed with the help of statistical techniques, supported by observation and case studies.

The painstaking effort undertaken for this book will be extremely useful to the scholars, policy makers, social scientists, NGO workers and administrators working for the welfare of the labour class in India. [from the back cover]

Title           :    Feminine Identity in a Transitional Society:
    Women in the Gupta Period (AD 300-600)

Author       :     Priya Darshini

Publsher    :    Manak

Year          :    2008 

Pages        :    269

Contents    :    Preface.   Systems of Translation Adopted for the Deva-Nagari Alphabet.   List of Abbreviations.   1. Introduction.  2. Nature of Transition During A.D. 300-600.  3. Position of Women in the Family.  4. Position of Women in the Society.  5. Disabilities Imposed on Women.  6. Conclusion.  Bibliography.  Index.

The author has tried to make an in-depth study of the changing dimension of the position of women during the Gupta period. It is obvious that gender relations in a number of connected domains were framed within notion of sacrality, which were expected to render them inviolable. It is evident that the elements of our traditions are fore grounded by such exponents, which constitute men and women differently. To reach to an analytical explanation the author has done justice to women by examining social process and the structures they create, thus crucially shaping and conditioning the feminine identity, experiencing transitory nomenclature in the Gupta period. [from the back cover]

Title           :   “Good Women do not Inherit Land” Politics of Land
    and Gender in India

Author       :    Nitya Rao

Publsher    :    Social Science Press

Year          :     2008 

Pages        :    356

Contents    :    Acknowledgements.  1. Introduction.  2. A Personal Journey.  3. Places of Poverty: The Villages Profiled.  4. Reinventing Tradition: Agrarian Movements in History.  5. Land as a Productive Resource.  6. Locating Identities.  7. Women’s Claims to Land.  8. Custom and the Courts: Bargaining with Modernity.  9. Development Interventions: Does One Size Fit All?.  10. Reframing the Sebate: Challenges and Dilemmas.  Annexure 1: profile of Sample Households.  Annexure 2: regional Demographic Indicators.  Annexure 3: Land and Production.  Annexure 4: Types of Land Disputes.  Bibliography.  Glossary.  Acronyms.  Index.

‘Good women should not claim a share in the inheritance, even if they have no brothers…’. Notions such as this have in their own way and over time, given the women in the Santal Parganas the resolve to wrest what is rightfully theirs.

This is a powerful book in the way in which it unfolds the lives and anxieties of Santal women in Dumka district, Jharkhand. From the very beginning, adivasi women come alive through separate life histories. They span different situations and social patterns but all of them relate to rights in landed property, and their own troubled identities the backdrop of harsh living conditions, social discrimination and lack of state support. Land for the Santal women is not a mere economic resource. It stands for security, social position and identity, and in this men have a distinct advantage. Soon after, writing in a personal vein, the author unfolds how these anxieties of the Santal women resonate her own.

The author traces the relationship between the Santals and their land from historic times to the present, when they have access to both the modern legal system and their own customary laws. She also examines the role of external agencies in this struggle-government administrative bodies, non-governmental organizations and political leaders. As modern influences crowd out traditional mores, the author asserts that development is not always a benign process of social advancement but a highly political struggle for re-negotiating power relations between men and women, and among social groups. The use of a ‘community’ identity as adivasis has also been responsible for denying women rights to land, in the context of the movement for political autonomy of Jharkhand.

Based on rich ethnographic material, this sensitive book lays bare the reality of being an adivasi and an adivasi women, in all its manners, in the modern globalized world.  [from the back cover]

Title           :   Mobilizing India: Women, Music, and Migration
   between India and Trinidad

Author       :    Tejanwini Niranjana

Publsher    :    Orient BlackSwan

Year          :     2006 

Pages        :    271

Contents    :   

Acknowledgments.  Note on Usage.   Introduction.  1. “The Indian and Me”: Studying the Subaltern Diaspora.  2. “Left to the Imagination”: Indian Nationalism and Female Sexuality.  3. “Take a Little Chutney,Add a Touch of Kaiso”: The Body in the Voice.  4. Jumping out of the Times: The “Indian” in Calypso.  5. “Suku Suku What shall I Do?”: Hindi Cinema and the Politics of Music.  Afterword: A Semi Lime.  Notes.  Bibliography.  Index.

Descendants of indentured laborers brought from India to the Caribbean between 1845 and 1917 comprise more than forty percent of Trinidad’s population today. While many Indo-Trinidadians identify themselves as Indian, what “Indian” signifies—about nationalism, gender, culture, caste, race, and religion—in the Caribbean is different from what it means on the subcontinent. Yet the ways that “Indianness” is conceived of and performed in India and in Trinidad have historically been, and remain, intimately related. Offering an innovative analysis of how ideas of Indian identity negotiated within the Indian diaspora in Trinidad affect cultural identities “back home,” Tejaswini Niranjana models a necessary project: comparative research across the global South, scholarship that decenters the “first world” West as the referent against which postcolonial subjects understand themselves and are understood by others.

Niranjana draws on nineteenth-century travel narratives, anthropological and historical studies of Trinidad, Hindi film music, and the lyrics, performance, and reception of chutney-soca and calypso songs to argue that perceptions of Indian female sexuality in Trinidad have long been central to the formation and disruption of dominant narratives of nationhood, modernity, and normative sexuality in India. She illuminates debates in India about “the woman question” as they played out in the early-twentieth-century campaign against indentured servitude in the tropics. In so doing, she reveals India’s disavowal of the indentured woman—viewed as morally depraved by her forced labor in Trinidad—as central to its own anticolonial struggle. Turning to the present, Niranjana looks to Trinidad’s most dynamic site of cultural negotiation: popular music. She describes how contested ideas of Indian femininity are staged by contemporary Trinidadian musicians—male and female, of both Indian and African descent—in genres ranging from new hybrids like chutney-soca to the older but still vibrant music of Afro-Caribbean calypso.  [from the back cover]

Title           :    Never Done and Poorly Paid: Women’s Work in
                      Globalizing India

Author       :    Jayati Ghosh

Publisher   :   Women Unlimited

Year          :    2009

Pages        :    185

Contents    :    Preface and Acknowledgements.  1. The International Context of Women’s Work.  2. Recent Economic Growth and Employment Patterns in India.  3. Conceptual Issues in Assessing Women’s Work.  4. Working for Wages.  5. Women in Public Employment.  6. One’s Own Boss.  7. Women Workers on the Move.  8. Working Without Pay and Looking for Work.  9.  Conclusion.  Additional References.

This book investigates the complex interaction of the forces of globalization with shifts in the nature of women’s work in the Indian context. It shows how rapid economic growth in India since the early 1990s has not been accompanied with the required expansion of productive employment opportunities. This has generated unexpected outcomes for patterns of women’s employment in India, which has shown quite paradoxical  trends: simultaneous increases in work participation rates, unpaid labour, migration for work and open unemployment of women.

The author attempts to unravel this complicated set of outcomes for women workers, by situating them in wider economic processes and relating them to economic policies and labour market developments. She argues that while the Indian economy’s recent boom has excluded the bulk of women in the country from its benefits, such tendencies are no longer unnoticed or uncontested. [from the back cover]

Title          :      Women Farmers of India

Author       :      Maithreyi Krishnaraj and Aruna Kanchi

Publisher   :      National Book Trust

Year          :      2008

Pages        :      161

Contents    :      I. Introduction.  II. Gender Inequality.  III. Broad Trends in Women’s Employment in Agriculture.  IV Invisibility of Women Farmers.   V. Just Rights and Better Access.  VI. Gender-Wise Policy.  VII. Conclusion.  Appendix.  References.  Index.

 

This book is a significant study that brings to light the ever increasing role that women are playing in the agricultural and allied sectors in India, while the stake of the men folk has been dwindling day by day. Even through, the book argues, ‘the face of the Indian farmers is a woman’s face’, women continue to get discriminated in this sector as seen through the lopsided manner in which their role is viewed both in public perception as well as by policy makers. The present pioneering study is likely to trigger a debate about ‘the invisibility of women farmers in India and the resultant social, economic, political and cultural complexities-the issues that have largely remained outside the mainstream intellectual discourse. [from the back cover]

Author        :     Sindhu Phadke

Publisher    :     Decent Books

Year           :     2008

Pages         :    478

Contents     :     Foreword.  Acknowledgements.  List of Tables and Maps,  Abbreviations and Terms Used.  Introduction.  A Map of North-Eastern Region.  1. North-Eastern Region: A Profile.  2. North-Eastern States: Seven Unique Sisters.  3. Economic Status of N-E Women.  4. Women’s Status in Marriage.  5. Health and Education.  6. Social and Political Status.  7. Recapitulation and Concluding Observations.  Bibliography.

The vast socio-economic and cultural diversity of the north-east region of India remains a largely unexplored area of academic research. Within it, the status of women continues to be a neglected aspect. This book contributes to the slowly expanding body of Literature on the subject of the status of women in the seven North-eastern states of India, viz. Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, Manipur, Maghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland and Tripura.

The author makes a painstaking effort to put together the economic, social, educational and cultural dimensions of the plight of women in these States, in the uniquely individual ecological, historical, social and political backdrop of the region. In the process she uncovers many aspects hitherto unknown to us, and also demolishes certain standard and preconceived notions about North-Eastern women. We learn about the distinctive features of each State, individually, in relation to each other, and the country as a whole.

Using primary and secondary sources, the author builds up a useful wealth of statistical information about the subject; the book also contains explanatory maps and charts. In all, it is a useful text not just for scholars of the North-East and Gender Studies, but also for the general readers as well.  [from the back cover]

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