CWDS Library - Recent Additions

Author      : Paula Banerjee

Publisher  : Sage

Year         : 2010

Pages      :  253

Contents:          Preface.  Acknowledgements.  Introduction: Histories and Historians of Borders. I.  Borders and Their Pasts:  1. Aliens in the Colonial World. 2. Borders as Unsettled Markers: the Sino-Indian Border.  3. The Line of Control: Kashmir.  II. Life on the Border:  4. Circles on Insecurity: the Border People.  5. Negotiating Differences: the Indian State and its Women in the Borderlands.  6. Mobile Diseases and the Border.  III. Law and the Border: 7. Border Laws and Conflicts in North-East India.  Epilogue.  Bibliography.  Index.  About the Author.

This is an insightful historical work on borders and bordered existences, with special emphasis on the gender dimensions of these existences. The author argues that the experiences of women living on borders and in borderlands are definitive of those of the vulnerable communities who bear the brunt of the complex border and security issues. The conditions of migrant women, women peace campaigners, and victims of human trafficking and mobile diseases are presented as the markers of bordered existences. Their history is one of negotiations with structures of control, leading to insecurity, subversion, endurance and a different kind of existence. Thus, this book adopts a critical feminist history angle.

Borders, Histories, Existences : Gender and Beyond contends that borders are, by definition, lines of inclusion and exclusion established by the state. It analysis how states construct borders and try to make them static and rigid and how bordered existences, such as women, migrant workers, victims of human trafficking, etc., destabilise the rigid constructs. It explores the political conditions that have made borders problematic in post-colonial South Asia and how these borders have become regions of extreme control or violence.

The book contains new research data and original theories and would provide crucial information to those studying colonial and post-colonial history, politics and international relations, South Asia studies and sociology." [from the back cover] 

Author      : Naila Kabeer

Publisher  : Routledge

Year         : 20107

Pages       : 385

Contents: List of Boxes and Tables. List of Abbreviations and Acronyms. Foreword. 1. Risk, Vulnerability and Social Protection: International Perspectives. 2. Gender and Trends in the Global Labour Force: New and Persisting Forms of Vulnerability. 3. Gender, Life Course and Livelihoods: Analytical Framework and Empirical Insights. 4. Preventing Child Labour, Promoting Education: Disrupting the Intergenerational Transmission of Poverty. 5. Alternative Approaches to Employment-based Social Protection. 6. Financial Services for Women in the Informal Economy: Protecting and Promoting Livelihoods. 7. Pensions and Transfers: Social Protection in Old Age. 8. The Indispensability of Voice: Organising for Social Protection in the Informal Economy. 9. Towards a 'Generative' Model of Social Protection: Making the Links to Development Policy. Bibliography. About the Author. Index

The vast majority of the world’s working women, particularly those from low-income households in developing countries, are located in the informal economy in activities that are casual, poorly paid, irregular and outside the remit of formal social security and protective legislation. This book examines the constraints and barriers which continue to confine women to these forms of work and what this implies for their ability to provide for themselves and their families and to cope with insecurity.

It develops a framework of analysis that integrates gender, life course and livelihoods perspectives in order to explore the interactions between gender inequality, household poverty and labour market forces that help to produce gender-differentiated experiences of risk and vulnerability for the working poor. Drawing on practical experiences from the field, It uses this framework to demonstrate the relevance of a gender-analytical approach to the design and evaluation of a range of social protection measures that are relevant to women at different stages of their life course. These include conditional and unconditional social transfers to reduce child labour and promote children’s education, child care support for working women, financial services for the poor, employment generation through public works and different measures for old age security.

The book stresses the importance of an organised voice for working women if they are to ensure that employers, trade unions and governments respond to their need for socio-economic security. Finally, the book synthesises the main lessons that emerge from the discussion and the linkages between social protection strategies and the broader macro-economic framework.

A book that will be of interest to a wide range of readers—those in the fields of economics, sociology and gender studies, as also activists and policy-makers. [from the back cover]

Title         : Gender, Language and Learning :
                  Essays in Indo-Muslim Cultural History

Author      : Gail Minault

Publisher  : Permanent Black

Year         : 2009

Pages       : 314

Contents: List of Abbreviations. Acknowledgements. Introduction: Gender, Language and Learning. I. Gender: 1. The Extended Family as Metaphor and the Expansion of Women's Realm. 2. Sayyid Mumtaz Ali and Huquq un-Niswan: An Advocate of Women's Rights in the Late Nineteenth Century. 3. Women, Legal Reform, and Muslim Identity. 4. Muslim Social History from Urdu Women's Magazines. II. Language: 5. Urdu Political Poetry During the Khilafat Movement. 6. Begamati Zuban: Women's Language and Culture in the Nineteenth Century. 7. Sayyid Ahmad Dehlavi and the Delhi Renaissance. 8. Ismat: Rashidul Khairi and Urdu Literary Journalism for Women. 9. Delhi College and Urdu. 10. Sayyid Karamat Husain and Education for Women. 11. Sharif Education for Girls at Aligarh. 12. The Campaign for a Muslim University. Bibliography. Index.   

Gender, Language and Learning collects articles published over the last thirty and more years, by a scholar who is among the most eminent Americans ever to have studied the history, life and culture of Indian Muslims.

The themes that have characterized Gail Minault's scholarship are all in evidence here: Indian Muslim women's rights and self-expression, Urdu as a language of cultural politics and identity, and education as a vehicle of social change among Indian Muslims. There are richly textured glimpses into social history through Minault's studies of the extended family, of women's magazines and of girls' schools. An educative and closely observed study of women's talk provides fresh insights into the lives of Urdu-speaking families in nineteenth-century India. Also included is her well-known and frequently-cited essay (co-authored with David Lelyveld) on the campaign for Aligarh Muslim University. This volume will be invaluable for anyone interested in the development and trajectories of Islam in South Asia. [from the back cover]

Title         : The Hour Past Midnight

Author      : Salma

Publisher  : Zubaan

Year         : 2009

Pages      : 478

Rabia is growing up in a conservative community in southern India. One day, she and her friends sneak off to the pictures. Caught on her return home, Rabia gets a beating from her mother, Zohra, who cries as she beats her daughter into submission. Firdaus is beautiful and of marriageable age. A groom is found for her, a wealthy man who lives abroad. On her wedding night, she takes one look at him and says, ‘I’m not going to live with you, don’t touch me!’ Inside their male dominated world, Rabia, Zohra, Firdaus, and many others make their small rebellions and compromises, friendships are made and broken, families come together and fall apart, and almost imperceptibly change creeps in. Salma’s beautiful, evocative, poetic novel recreates the sometimes suffocating, and sometimes heartbreaking world of Muslim women in southern India [from the back cover]

Title           : Motiba's Tattoos: A Granddaughter's Journey into
                          Her Indian Family's Past

Author       : Mira Kamdar

Publisher   : Public Affairs

Year          : 2000

Contents:  Introduction.  Kathiawar.  Rangoon. Bombay. America.  Kaliyuga.  Acknowledgments. Glossary. Notes.   

 

When Motiba died a whole world disappeared with her. Motiba- “grand-mother” in Gujarati- was marked with mysterious signs from a lost era: geo-metric tattoos on her face and forearms. What did these symbols mean? When had they been etched? Why? Haunted by the riddle of Motiba’s tattoos, Mira Kamdar begins a journey down the hazy, twisting corridors of the past. The deeper she delves, the more she realizes that her family’s story is part of a much larger saga. It is one version of the grat story of the twentieth century- the story of leaving home, of severing roots, of losing one’s tribe; the story of abandoning a rural life firmly anchored in traditions and rituals for the tantalizing prospects of urban existence in an increasingly global consumer culture.

Kamdar’s journey begins in Motiba’s birthplace, the tiny village of Gokhlana in Kathiawar, India. From Gokhlana, she follows her family as it emigrates from the feudal, rural India of 1900 to the bustling streets of Rangoon in the 1920s and 1930s. The family joins the thriving Gujarati merchant community in Burma, and quickly prospers. But their Burmese idyll is shattered when the Japanese bomb Rangoon in December 1941. After a harrowing flight out of war-torn Burma, the family returns only to be stripped of their riches and expelled by the Burmese dictatorship in the early 1960s.They start afresh in Bombay. It is there, in Bombay’s sumptuous Art Deco movie houses, that the Children discover America. Seduced by Hollywood’s fantastic portrayal of post-war American life, Kamdar’s nineteen-year old father sets off for the United States. We witness his travails as a lonely Indian immigrant in the 1950s, and see how his children and grandchildren grapple with a multi-ethnic identity in the late twentieth century.

With rich, vivid details of her relatives’ many fascinating lives, Kamdar deftly evokes the moods and atmospheres of lost times and places. She retraces pivotal historical moments- Satyagraha and India’s independence movement, World War II, the “brain drain” years of a triumphant American military-industrial complex, the borderless, dot. Com world of the Indian diaspora today-but never strays form the intimate experiences of her remarkable family.Mira Kamdar is a Senior Fellow at the World Policy Institute at New School University where her research and writing focus on economic and political transition in India. She divides her time between New York City’s East Village and the Pacific Northwest.
[from the back cover]

Title           : Theatre in Colonial India : Play-House of Power

Author       :  Lata Singh (ed.)

Publisher   : Oxford University Press

Year          : 2009

Pages        : 354

Contents:          Acknowledgements.  Introduction.  I. Theatre: A Contested Site of Modernity and Appropriation:  1. The Heroine's Song in the Marathi Theatre Between 1910 and 1920: Its Code and Its Public.  2. Theatre Songs: the Alter Ego of the Nineteenth Century Bengali Stage.  3. Legacies of Discourse: Special Drama and its History.  4. Ushering Changes: Constructing the history of Tamil Theatre During Colonial Times Through Drama Notices.  5. Some Issues in Conceptualizing Popular Culture: the Case of the Lavani and Powada in Maharashtra.  6. Foreign Origins/Native Destinations: Shakespeare and the Logic of Vernacular Public Stage.  II. Theatre and Gender: Re-Scribing Patriarchy:  7. Excluding the Petty and Grotesque: Depicting Women in Early Twentieth Century Marathi Theatre.  8. Reading Premchand's The Actress. 9. Jester and Gender in Manipuri Theatre Tradition During the Colonial Era (1891-1947) Manipur.  10. Kattaikkuttu Girls.  11. Fore-Grounding the Actresses' Question: Bengal and Maharashtra.  12. Changing Roles: Women in the People's Theatre Movement in Bengal (1942-51).  13. Historicizing Actress Stories: English Actresses in India (1789-1842).  Glossary.  Contributors.

"Theatre has constituted an important part of cultural life and public entertainment in India from pre-colonial times. It was not only a site of appropriation, contestation, and subversion of authority but also emerged as a frontal site of political contestation in colonial India.

Underscoring theatre as a popular site of hegemonic and counter-hegemonic struggle, Play-House of Power locates the art form in the large social and political context. Going beyond the dominant binary framework characteristic of studies on theatre--rural/urban, classical/folk, elite/popular--it takes a more nuanced approach. The volume explores various aspects of colonial theatre in terms of its politics, its linkages with modernity, and as a domain for intersection of high and low cultures.

The essays also emphasize the multifaceted relationship between gender and theatre. They showcase how women shared a problematic and tenuous relationship with theatre during this period. The politics of social class, gendered ideologies, and nationalism permeating the theatre space excluded women performers from the new nation state. However, the conjunction of political and cultural activism also had the potential to highlight women's role in culture.

Supported by detailed case studies, this interdisciplinary volume will be of considerable interest to scholars and students of theatre and performance studies, modern Indian history, sociology, gender studies, and literature.  [from the back cover]

Title           : Translating Women Indian Interventions

Author        : N Kamala (ed.)

Publisher    : Zubaan

Year          :  2009

Pages        : 164 

Contents: Acknowledgements. Introduction. 1. Gendering Translation, Translating Gender: A Case Study of Kerala. 2. Translation Gendered, Nation Engendered: H.V. Savitramma's Translations. 3. Ambai: The Language of Love, Desire and Sexuality. 4. To Pierce a Mustard Seed and Let in Seven Oceans. 5. Remapping Stylistic Boundaries: Translating Early Oriya Women's Literature. 6. Women's Writing: Rewriting Difference. 7. When Silences Speak... Translating Muted Voices: Choices and Challenges. 8. Exploring the Unexplored: Tamil Women's Writing in French Translation. 9. Appropriating the Local for the Global: Transporting Shashi Deshpande to German Shores. Notes on Contributors.

While women's language, women's writings, and women's views about the world we live in have all been the focus of much debate and study, this book explores the translation of these experiences and these writings in the context of India, with its multifaceted, multilingual character. If women's language is different from the patriarchal language that forms the basis of communication in most language communities, what has been the impact of writings from the women's perspective and how have these writings been translated?

Indian women writers have been translated into English in the Indian context as well as into other western languages. What are the linguistic and cultural specificities of these literary productions? What is fore grounded and what is erased in these translations? What are the politics that inform the choices of the authors to be translated? What is the agency of the translators, and of the archivist, in these cultural productions? What is the role of women translators? These are some of the questions that this book explores.

The book contains insightful essays by some of the best translation scholars in India with an in-depth Introduction and an essay by the well-known writer Ambai on her experience of being translated. [from the back cover]

Author     : Vineeta Srivastava

Publisher : Rawant

Year       : 2010

Pages     : 305

Contents: Acknowledgements. 1. Gender and Ageing: The World and Indian Scenarios. 2. Gender Ageing: Conceptual and Theoretical Framework. 3. Urban Aged Women: Personal Profile and Resource Endowment. 4. Health, Mobility and Leisure Time Activities. 5. Conflicts, Problems and Expectations of the Urban Aged Women: Emerging Challenges. 6. Social Work Intervention in Ageing. Appendix. Bibliography. Index.

Gender’ and ‘ageing’ have become the core of any genuine development concern both at the national and the international level. Demographic trends have made ‘population ageing’ inevitable in almost every country today. The longevity of population has increased from 1920s - first in developed countries followed by developing ones, thanks to health and medical services. The special problems confronting the aged women have their origins, in part, in their very early life. The problems of an ageing woman are not so much a product of the ageing as they are a product of widespread perceptions of the inferior status of a woman throughout her life.

There is no dearth of books on this topic written both within and outside India, but the present work is different since it provides a kaleidoscopic review of the varied theories, policies and specific issues in a lucid manner. It makes a vivid micro-level analysis of various issues of ageing from gender perspectives with focus on the lifestyle, needs and problems of the urban aged women across various income categories. Teachers, researchers, NGO professionals, social workers, volunteers and government officials working in the area of gender, gerontology and social work will find the book extremely useful. [from the back cover]

Title          : Women Centre Stage: The Dramatist and the Play

Author       : Poile Sengupta

Publisher   : Routledge

Year          : 2010

Contents:          Preface and Acknowledgements.  Introduction.  Mangalam.  Inner Laws.  Keats Was a Tuber.  Alipha.  Thus Spake Shoorpanakha, So Said Shakuni.  Samara’s Song.  About the Author.

 

This selection of six contemporary plays explores a wide range of issues — familial, social, mythological, political — with women centre stage. The plays are distinct from each other in structure, theme and style, but are bound together by a common thread — the position and role of women in family, social and political systems. Issues such as sexual abuse, in-law relationships, the trauma of ageing, the struggle for women’s empowerment, love and passion, desire and revenge, and dynastic politics are discussed through the varying perspectives of a number of characters, bringing an immediacy and urgency to the subjects under consideration.

What is significant about the plays is that they highlight the manipulation of the English language resulting with the introduction of an ‘Indian’ syntax. Multilingualism is used to offset the so-called ‘westernisation’ that has been the by-product of the systematic globalisation of ‘third world’ countries. While the plays are meant to be staged, they are also very reader-friendly and will be entertaining as well as educative for the general reader.  [from the back cover]

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