CWDS Library - Recent Additions

Title          :    Daughters of Shame

Author       :   Jasvinder Sanghera

Publisher   :   Hodder & Stoughton

Year          :   2009

Pages        :  304




 

Jasvinder Sanghera knows what it means to flec from your family under threat of forced marriage---and to face the terrible consequences that follows. As a young girl that was just what she had to do.

Jasvinder is now at the front line of the battle to save women from the honour based violence and threat of forced marriage that destroyed her own youth. Daughters of Shame reveals the stories of young women such as Fozia, aged only fifteen when her family tried to force her into marriage; Shazia kidnapped and taken to Pakistan to marry a man she had never met; and Banaz, murdered by her own family after escaping an abusive marriage.

By turns frightening, enthralling and uplifting, Daughters of Shame reveals Jasvinder as a women heedless of her own personal safety as she fights to help these women, in a world where the suffering and abuse of many is challenged by the courage of the few.  [from the back cover] 

Title           :   Scripting lives: Narratives of ‘Dominent Women’
   in Kerala
 

Author       :    Sharmila Sreekumar

Publsher    :    Orient BlackSwan

Year          :    2009 

Pages        :    312

Contents    :   Acknowledgements.  1. Starting Out.  2. Understanding Experience: Moving Beyond Gender and Genre.  3. Present’ing Kerala.  4. The Content of Utopia: Kerala Model, God’s Own Country and Women’s Narratives of Success.  5. The Discontinent of Dystopia: Sexual Violence, AIDS and Narratives of Women’s Failed Bodies.  6. Interstice.  7. The World of Democracy.  8. Odds and Ends.  Select Bibliography.  Index.

How does one examine the lives women script in the intimacy of diaries, letters and other personal narratives and how can one relate these to the social worlds in which they are produced'

Centring its investigation on contemporary Kerala, it examines a range of diverse and seemingly disconnected discourses around the Kerala model, tourism, AIDS and sexual violence and argues that present-day Kerala maps two opposing worlds. It imagines itself as a perfected utopia and, simultaneously, also as a dystopiaa society that is on the edge of collapse. The book attempts to explore these divergent self-descriptions of Kerala. Concurrently it also analyses a range of personal narratives to trace how "dominant women" configure their selves. It deploys the term "dominant women" to signal women of relative privilege, whose experience speaks simultaneously of devaluation and dominance. Their lives also signal the asymmetries, the instabilities and the inequalities within the category "woman". These women are, in many ways, the subject of the development narratives of the state. The book reveals how discourses apparently removed from women's everyday shape their personal experiences and, in turn, how women's self-formations overwrite, extend and rework these "larger" discourses.

Sreekumar's writing is compelling and textured. Her research, based on a wide range of women's narratives, makes this a riveting journey into the makings of modern-day Kerala [from the back cover]

Title           :   Street Singers of Lucknow and Other Stories

Author       :    Qurratulain Hyder

Publsher    :    Women Unlimited

Year          :    2008 

Pages        :   228

Contents   :       Introduction.   1. Street Singers of Lucknow.  2. The Story of Catherine Bolton.  3. Confessions of Saint Flora of Georgia.  4. The Guest House.  5. Beyond the Speed of Light.  6. A Night on Pali Hill.  7. Honour.  8. The Missing Photograph.  9. Tea Gardens of Sylhet.
 

This fascinating collection of short stories highlights the innovative genius of this iconoclastic writer as she moves from realism to the fabular, and from history to time-travel.

In the title story, women with social satire and melodrama, an itinerant entertainer becomes a well-known singer, eventually coming back to her Lucknow roots in a subdued, melancholy ending. A cast of characters entertain themselves with gossip and adultery in the lush tranquility of the tea gardens of east Bengal. At the centre is a merculiar, identity-changing adventurers, one who often appears in Hyder’s fiction. Another is the memorable Eurasian. Catherine Bolton, who escapes her roots to achieve social success.

This versatile writer takes imaginative flight in unusal stories spanning decades, or even centuries. Her arsenal of techniques-pastiche, satire, memoir, collage-takes us to the place most important to her, the human heart in all its varied seasons.  [from the back cover]

Title           :    Violence, Martyrdom and Partition :

                      A Daughter's Testimony

Author       :     Nonica Datta

Publsher    :    Oxford University Press

Year          :    2009 

Pages        :    235

Contents   :       List of Photographs and Map.  Preface. 1. Introducing Subhashini. 2. A Daughter's Testimony:   Part 1.  A  Pitch Dark Night. Part II.  Pitaji  ka  Balidan.  Part III.. The Vultures Ruled.  3. A Letter to  Subhashini.  Glossary.  Index.

This book presents the oral testimony of Subhashini (1914-2003), the woman head of a well-known Arya Samaj institution devoted to women's education in rural north India. Subhashini's narrative unfolds a story, within a sea of stories, which has remained silent in the dominant historical discourse. Her memory evokes contrasting images of violence, martyrdom and Partition. Not 1947 but 1942--the year of her father's 'martyrdom'-- is recalled as a violent rupture in her memory. Partition is a moment of celebration, revenge, divine retribution, empathy, remorse, tragedy and fear.

Translating Subhashini's oral testimony, Nonica Datta recreates the memory of a colonial subject, living in postcolonial times, as a historical narrative. Moving beyond a historical event and well-established historical facts, Violence, Martyrdom and Partition is a parallel history of events and non-events, memory and history, testimony and experience. Breaking the silence of an oral testimony and presenting memory as history, this work opens up the historians' territory.

This testimony defies the opposition between subject and agent, victim and victimizer, witness and survivor, aggressor and spectator, perpetrator and by stander. Subhashini's candid, repetitive narrative suggests a remarkable interplay of individual and collective remembrance, and reveals the shifts, ambiguities, silences and contradictions in an individual memory.

"A highly readable and novel work, this book will be of interest to historians, sociologists, anthropologists, literary scholars, and those engaged with culture and gender studies. [from the back cover]

Title           :   Women in Peace Politics

Author       :    Paula Banerjee (ed.)

Publsher    :    Sage

Year          :     2008 

Pages        :    323

Contents  :  Series Note.  Preface.  I. Ideas and Ideologies.  II.  Movements.  III.  Voices.  Further Readings on Themes in Peace Studies.  About the Editor and Contributors.  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.

Women in Peace Politics explores the role of women as agents and visionaries of peace in South Asia. Peace is redefined to include in its fold the attempt by women to be a part of the peace making process, reworking the structural inequalities faced by them and their struggle against all forms of oppression.

This volume, the third in the series of the South Asia Peace Studies, deals with the myriad dimensions of peace as practised by South Asian women over a period of time. It chronicles the lives of "ordinary" women—their transformative role in peace and an attempt to create a space of their own. Their peace activism is examined in the historical context of their participation in national liberation movements since the early twentieth century. The articles in the collection adopt a new approach to understanding peace—as a desire to end repression that cuts across caste, class, race and gender and an effort on the part of women to transform their position in society.

This compilation would interest a wide readership besides students and scholars of human rights, peace and security studies, politics and international relations.  [from the back cover]

Title           :   Working Women : Stories of Strife, Struggle and Survival

Author       :    Kogi Naidoo and Fay Patel (eds.)

Publsher    :    Sage

Year          :     2009 

Pages        :    245

Contents   :      Foreword by Harsh Suri.   Preface.  Acknowledgements.   Part I.  Struggles in the Workplace.  Part II.  Exploitation in the Workplace.  Part III. Health and Wellness.  Part IV. Having Faith: Religious and Spiritual Journeys.  Part V.  Finding Spaces: Women's Empowerment.  Part VI. Conclusion.  About the Editors and Contributors.

This book contains narratives pertaining to the challenges, struggles and success stories of women in the workplace who come from diverse cultures and social backgrounds. The essays discuss the struggles of women who were marginalised but who fought for recognition, dignity and respect in their workplaces and personal lives. The narratives cross cultural boundaries, presenting multiple dimensions of the struggle and success of women from different walks of life.

Working Women: Stories of Strife, Struggle and Survival brings hope for those who continue to suffer in silence. This multicultural anthology of essays highlights women's perspectives on a wide range of issues : survival in the workplace, spirituality and religion, empowerment and financial independence, and health and wellness. It provides a space for women to present their lived realities within a global context. 

Given its racy and lucid narrative style, this book would interest a wide readership including working women from various backgrounds, women's groups and non-governmental organisations. It would also interest those involved in women's studies, gender studies, and the study of organisational culture and communication, sociology and human resource management  [from the back cover]

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