Gender in Modern India: History, Culture, Marginality

Gender in Modern India brings together pioneering research on a range of themes including social reforms, caste, and contestations; Adivasis, patriarchy, and colonialism; capitalism, political economy, and labour; masculinity and sexuality; health, medical care, and institution building; culture and identity; and migration and its new dynamics.

Commissioned in remembrance of the prolific social historian Biswamoy Pati, this volume examines the gender question through a multilayered and multi-dimensional frame in which interdisciplinarity and intersectionality play an important role. Using case studies on gender from diverse geographies--east, west, north, south, and northeast; community locations--Hindu, Muslim, and Christian; and marginalized socio-economic or ethnic habitations such as those of Dalits and Adivasis, the contributors highlight the complexities and diversities of women’s negotiations of patriarchies in varied social, ethnic, and community contexts.

Collectively, the chapters in this volume focus on three related and overlapping settings--colonial, colonial and postcolonial continuum, and postcolonial. They delineate the multiple lives of gender by focusing on its intersections with other markers of difference including race, class, caste, sexuality, culture, ethnicity, region, and occupation, thereby questioning stereotypes, challenging dated notions and interpretations of gender, and demonstrating the ubiquity of patriarchy.

Lata Singh is a faculty member of the Centre for Women’s Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University. She has been a British Academy Visiting Fellow, Fellow at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla, and University Grants Commission Research Awardee. An editorial board member of the Dutch Journal of Feminist Studies, her books and edited collections include Raising the Curtain: Recasting Women Performers in India (Orient BlackSwan, 2017); Theatre in Colonial India: Play-House of Power (OUP, 2009); Popular Translations of Nationalism: Bihar, 1920-22 (Primus Books, 2012); Colonial and Contemporary Bihar and Jharkhand (Primus Books, 2014); and Violence and Performing Arts (IIAS Shimla, 2016). She was the Guest Editor of a special issue of the Indian Historical Review on ’Issues of Gender: Colonial and Post-Colonial India’ (2008).

Shashank Shekhar Sinha is an independent researcher and the author of Restless Mothers and Turbulent Daughters: Situating Tribes in Gender Studies (Stree, 2005) and Delhi, Agra, Fatehpur Sikri: Monuments, Cities and Connected Histories (Pan Macmillan, 2021). He has published extensively on Adivasis, gender, and witch hunting. Sinha taught undergraduate courses in history at the University of Delhi for almost a decade (1994-2004). He worked with Oxford University Press (2004-2012) before moving on to join Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, as Publishing Director (South Asia) in 2012.