An impressive collection of writings on women's issues in Indian history

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.

Inspired by egalitarian doctrines, the Dalit communities in India have been fighting for basic human and civic rights since the middle of the nineteenth century. In this book, Shailaja Paik focuses on the struggle of Dalit women in one arena - the realm of formal education – and examines a range of interconnected social, cultural and political questions. What did education mean to women? How did changes in women’s education affect their views of themselves and their domestic work, public employment, marriage, sexuality, and childbearing and rearing? What does the dissonance between the rhetoric and practice of secular education tell us about the deeper historical entanglement with modernity as experienced by Dalit communities? Dalit Women's Education in Modern India is a social and cultural history that challenges the triumphant narrative of modern secular education to analyse the constellation of social, economic, political and historical circumstances that both opened and closed opportunities to many Dalits. By focusing on marginalised Dalit women in modern Maharashtra, who have rarely been at the centre of systematic historical enquiry, Paik breathes life into their ideas, expectations, potentials, fears and frustrations. Addressing two major blind spots in the historiography of India and of the women’s movement, she historicises Dalit women’s experiences and constructs them as historical agents. The book combines archival research with historical fieldwork, and centres on themes including slum life, urban middle classes, social and sexual labour, and family, marriage and children to provide a penetrating portrait of the actions and lives of Dalit women. Elegantly conceived and convincingly argued, Dalit Women's Education in Modern India will be invaluable to students of History, Caste Politics, Women and Gender Studies, Education Studies, Urban Studies and Asian studies.

The author traces the history of Indian women from the nineteenth century under colonial rule, to the twentieth century after Independence. She begins with the reform movement, established by men to educate women, and demonstrates how education changed their lives, enabling them to take part in public life. Through the women's own accounts, the author has compiled an accessible and immediate record of their achievements over the past two centuries, which will be of interest to students of South Asia and to anyone concerned with women and their history.

This book explores the intersectional aspects of caste and gender in India that contribute to the multiple marginalities and oppressions of lower castes, with particular reference to Dalits, Muslims and women. It moves beyond the conventional accounts of experiences of women in unequal social and political relationships to examine how caste as a system and ideology shapes hegemonic masculinity and feminization of work, and thus contributes to the violence against women. The volume looks at their everyday lived realities within and across diverse social and political contexts — families, education systems, labour, communities, political parties, power, social organisations, the politics of representation and the writing of the subaltern women. With a range of empirical work, it brings forth the complexities of identity politics and further analyses its limits in regional and historical frameworks. This book will be of interest to students, scholars and specialists in caste and gender studies, exclusion and discrimination studies, sociology and social anthropology, history and political science. It will also be useful to Dalit writers and people working in the development sector in India.

The essays in this volume develop an understanding of the institutions, practices and forms of representation of Indian sexual relations and their boundaries of legitimacy.

Includes songs by Buddhist nuns, testimonies of medieval rebel poets and court historians, and the voices of more than 60 other writers of the 18th and 19th centuries. Among the diverse selections are a rare early essay by an untouchable woman; an account by the first feminist historian; and a selection from the first novel written in English by an Indian woman.