Women In Ancient India Played A Dynamic Role In Hindu Society. During The Muslim Period, Indian Woman Had To Adapt Her Role According To Changing Circumstances And Social Evils Like Child Marriage And Purdah System Came Into Vogue And Women s Status Under Went Subservient. Indian Women Have Responded To Modern Conditions In A Very Progressive Way. Indian Woman Have Made Its Mark In The Field Of Politics, Education And Professions. Inspite Of High Illiteracy Rate Among Indian Women, India Has Produced Eminent Indian Women In The Post Independence Period. This Book Examines The Role Of Indian Women In A Historical And Comparative Perspectives. The Book It Is Hoped Will Be Found Useful By Social Scientists, Policy Planners And National Leaders.

Unlike the West, India presents a fascinating example of a society where the pre-modern continues to co-exist with the modern. Modernity in Indian Social Theory explores the social variance between India and the West to show how it impacted their respective trajectories of modernity. A. Raghuramaraju argues that modernity in the West involved disinheriting the pre-modern, and temporal ordering of the traditional and modern. It was ruthlessly implemented through programmes of industrialization, nationalism, and secularism. This book underscores that India did not merely the Western model of modernity or experience a temporal ordering of society. It situates this sociological complexity in the context of the debates on social theory. The author critically examines various discourses on modernity in India, including Partha Chatterjee’s account of Indian nationalism; Javeed Alam’s reading of Indian secularism; the use of the term pluralism by some Indian social scientists; and Gopal Guru’s emphasis on the lived Dalit experience. He also engages with the readings on key thinkers including Vivekananda, Aurobindo, Gandhi, and Ambedkar.

Explores the imagery of woman in Mexican art and visual culture. Examines how woman signified a variety of concepts, from modernity to authenticity and revolutionary social transformation, both before and after the Mexican Revolution.

A handbook for understanding the situations of women in Asia today

Along with a range of socio-cultural, political and economic concerns, the focus on ‘self’ has been an inevitable assertion of writers during the last quarter of the twentieth century. Individualistic in tone, the contemporary women novelists are trying to portray realistically the predicament of modern women torn between the forces of tradition and modernity, their sense of frustration and alienation, the emotional and psychological turmoil and complexities of man-women relationships and subtleties of feminine consciousness against the persistent patriarchal social set-up. Cognizant of the evils originating from patriarchy, a positive sense of feminine identity has been recognized by them and the result is the emergence of a new woman in Indian society and its concept in the Indian English novel which has assumed a strident posture in the contemporary writings by women. The shift from submission to assertion, acquiescence to resistance and obedience to rebellion, however, has not been abrupt and effortless. Women are still in the process of negotiation with different limiting factors and thresholds of patriarchy to claim their due space and affirm their identity. The present study is an attempt to critically investigate the negotiations with cultural norms by the women characters in the selected novels by the contemporary novelists, namely Manju Kapur and Anita Nair. Almost all the women characters, major and minor, from the selected novels have been considered and positioned as per their ideological leanings and convictions under two thematic chapters namely “Women in the Clutches of Traditional Norms,” and “Tradition to Modernity.” The major issues around which the novels move – education, marriage, gendered space and mother-daughter relationships – are taken up to put them within the contemporary social conditions in which women characters live. The present book is divided into five chapters to make a critical and analytical study of the select novels of these contemporary Indian women writers in English. The present work is focused on five selected novels: Manju Kapur’s “Difficult Daughters”, “Home” and “Custody” and Anita Nair’s “Ladies Coupé” and “Mistress”.

Open-access edition: DOI 10.6069/9780295748856 Beginning in the late nineteenth century, India played a pivotal role in global conversations about population and reproduction. In Reproductive Politics and the Making of Modern India, Mytheli Sreenivas demonstrates how colonial administrators, postcolonial development experts, nationalists, eugenicists, feminists, and family planners all aimed to reform reproduction to transform both individual bodies and the body politic. Across the political spectrum, people insisted that regulating reproduction was necessary and that limiting the population was essential to economic development. This book investigates the often devastating implications of this logic, which demonized some women’s reproduction as the cause of national and planetary catastrophe. To tell this story, Sreenivas explores debates about marriage, family, and contraception. She also demonstrates how concerns about reproduction surfaced within a range of political questions—about poverty and crises of subsistence, migration and claims of national sovereignty, normative heterosexuality and drives for economic development. Locating India at the center of transnational historical change, this book suggests that Indian developments produced the very grounds over which reproduction was called into question in the modern world. The open-access edition of Reproductive Politics and the Making of Modern India is freely available thanks to the TOME initiative and the generous support of The Ohio State University Libraries.

Contentious Traditions analyzes the debate on sati, or widow burning, in colonial India. Though the prohibition of widow burning in 1829 was heralded as a key step forward for women's emancipation in modern India, Lata Mani argues that the women who were burned were marginal to the debate and that the controversy was over definitions of Hindu tradition, the place of ritual in religious worship, the civilizing missions of colonialism and evangelism, and the proper role of the colonial state. Mani radically revises colonialist as well as nationalist historiography on the social reform of women's status in the colonial period and clarifies the complex and contradictory character of missionary writings on India. The history of widow burning is one of paradox. While the chief players in the debate argued over the religious basis of sati and the fine points of scriptural interpretation, the testimonials of women at the funeral pyres consistently addressed the material hardships and societal expectations attached to widowhood. And although historiography has traditionally emphasized the colonial horror of sati, a fascinated ambivalence toward the practice suffused official discussions. The debate normalized the violence of sati and supported the misconception that it was a voluntary act of wifely devotion. Mani brilliantly illustrates how situated feminism and discourse analysis compel a rewriting of history, thus destabilizing the ways we are accustomed to look at women and men, at "tradition," custom, and modernity.