Indian writing in English (IWE) is now a widely recognized and awarded genre, boasting of world renowned authors in its ranks. The ‘fathers’ of IWE, Mulk Raj Anand, R.K. Narayan, and Raja Rao, have now been canonized and their works widely studied. Yet, very little scholarly attention has been paid to the pioneering literary contributions of Indian women to analyse their effect on the cultural history of their times. Mothering India addresses this lack and concentrates on early Indian women’s fiction written between 1890 and 1947. It not only evaluates the influence of women authors on the rise of IWE, but also explores how they reassessed and challenged stereotypes about womanhood in India, adding their voice to the larger debate about social reform legislations on women’s rights. Moreover, in choosing to write in the colonizer’s language, they seized the attention of a much wider international readership. In wielding their pens, these trendsetting women stepped into the literary landscape as ‘speaking subjects’, refusing the passivity of being ‘spoken-of objects’, and thereby ‘mothering’ India by redefining her image.

What does it mean to be a middle-class Muslim kid in India today? Talking to over a hundred children and their parents across twelve cities, Nazia Erum uncovers stories of religious segregation in classrooms and rampant bullying of Muslim children in many of the countryÕs top schools.

This book presents an overview of the varied experiences and representations of motherhood in India from ancient to modern times. The thrust of the arguments made by the various contributors is that the centrality of motherhood as an ideology in a woman’s life is manufactured. This is demonstrated by analysing various institutional structures of society – language, religion, media, law and technology. The articles in this book are chronologically arranged, tracing the different stages that motherhood as a concept has traversed in India – from goddess worship to nationalism, to being a vehicle of reproduction of the sexual division of labour and the inheritance of property via the male-line. Underlying these stages are the dialectics between them that have been facilitated by agents such as the state – the ultimate controller of a woman’s reproductive powers. The feminist critique of ‘essentialising’ the role of a woman has been employed to deconstruct and humanise the experiences and lives of mothers. This anthology therefore attempts to initiate a meaningful and ‘sensitive’ engagement with issues pertaining to a woman’s autonomy over her body and her role also as a mother.

Examining a range of South Asian Anglophone diasporic fiction and poetry, this monograph opens a new dialogue between diaspora studies and gender studies. It shows how discourses of diaspora benefit from re-examining their own critical relation to concepts of the maternal and the motherland. Rather than considering maternity as a fixed or naturally given category, it challenges essentialist conceptions and explores mothering as a performative practice which actively produces discursive meaning. This innovative approach also involves an investigation of central metaphors in nationalist and diasporic rhetorics, bringing critical attention to the strategies they employ and the unique aesthetic forms they produce.

Somewhere in Africa, more than a million years ago, a line of apes began to rear their young differently than their Great Ape ancestors. From this new form of care came new ways of engaging and understanding each other. How such singular human capacities evolved, and how they have kept us alive for thousands of generations, is the mystery revealed in this bold and wide-ranging new vision of human emotional evolution. Mothers and Others finds the key in the primatologically unique length of human childhood. If the young were to survive in a world of scarce food, they needed to be cared for, not only by their mothers but also by siblings, aunts, fathers, friends—and, with any luck, grandmothers. Out of this complicated and contingent form of childrearing, Sarah Hrdy argues, came the human capacity for understanding others. Mothers and others teach us who will care, and who will not. From its opening vision of “apes on a plane”; to descriptions of baby care among marmosets, chimpanzees, wolves, and lions; to explanations about why men in hunter-gatherer societies hunt together, Mothers and Others is compellingly readable. But it is also an intricately knit argument that ever since the Pleistocene, it has taken a village to raise children—and how that gave our ancient ancestors the first push on the path toward becoming emotionally modern human beings.

There has been little public discussion on the devastating impact of Covid-19 on mothers, or a public acknowledgement that mothering is frontline work in this pandemic. This collection of 45 chapters and with 70 contributors is the first to explore the impact of the pandemic on mothers' care and wage labour in the context of employment, schooling, communities, families, and the relationships of parents and children. With a global perspective and from the standpoint of single, partnered, queer, racialized, Indigenous, economically disadvantaged, disabled, and birthing mothers, the volume examines the increasing complexity and demands of childcare, domestic labour, elder care, and home schooling under the pandemic protocols; the intricacies and difficulties of performing wage labour at home; the impact of the pandemic on mothers' employment; and the strategies mothers have used to manage the competing demands of care and wage labour under COVID-19. By way of creative art, poetry, photography, and creative writing along with scholarly research, the collection seeks to make visible what has been invisibilized and render audible what has been silenced: the care and crisis of motherwork through and after the COVID-19 pandemic.

India imposes stringent criminal penalties, including life imprisonment in some states, for cow slaughter, based on a Hindu ethic of revering the cow as sacred. And yet India is among the world's leading producers of beef, leather, and milk, industries sustained by the mass slaughter of bovines. What is behind this seeming contradiction? What do bovines, deemed holy in Hinduism, experience in the Indian milk and beef industries? Yamini Narayanan asks and answers these questions, introducing cows and buffaloes as key subjects in India's cow protectionism, rather than their treatment hitherto as mere objects of political analysis. Emphasizing human–animal hierarchical relations, Narayanan argues that the Hindu framing of the cow as "mother" is one of human domination, wherein bovine motherhood is simultaneously capitalized for dairy production and weaponized by right-wing Hindu nationalists to violently oppress Muslims and Dalits. Using ethnographic and empirical data gathered across India, this book reveals the harms caused to buffaloes, cows, bulls, and calves in dairying, and the exploitation required of the diverse, racialized labor throughout India's dairy production continuum to obscure such violence. Ultimately, Narayanan traces how the unraveling of human domination and exploitation of farmed animals is integral to progressive multispecies democratic politics, speculating on the real possibility of a post-dairy society, based on vegan agricultural policies for livelihoods and food security.

The two phenomena highlighted in this edited volume 'motherhood/mothering and masculinities' are each recent areas of development in critical Feminist and Men's Studies. In contributing to these areas of gender studies, this book draws attention to the fact that much can also be gained when we explore relationships between them, an idea that may not readily come to mind. While femininities and masculinities are co-constructed, motherhood and mothering bring additional perspectives to the study of femininity that affect the construction of masculinity in complex ways. The 12 chapters in this volume allow readers to ponder some of these complexities and may suggest other issues that require investigation. Spanning many continents, the essays have both a global and historical reach emphasising cultural differences and historical changes. Of import is the idea that mothers have agency and are active in constructions affecting their lives. They are able to bring motherhood out of the shadows as they strive to build, re-evaluate, or alter their roles within families and communities. These have an impact on developments in masculinities. The book is divided into three parts and the chapters investigate a wide range of issues including cultural constructs, gender in parent/child, relationships, non-binary developments, the impact of war on mothering, decolonisation struggles, and much more.

Textual Mothers/Maternal Texts focuses on mothers as subjects and as writers who produce auto/biography, fiction, and poetry about maternity. International contributors examine the mother without child, with child, and in her multiple identities as grandmother, mother, and daughter. The collection examines how authors use textual spaces to accept, negotiate, resist, or challenge traditional conceptions of mothering and maternal roles, and how these texts offer alternative practices and visions for mothers. Further, it illuminates how textual representations both reflect and help to define or (re)shape the realities of women and families by examining how mothering and being a mother are political, personal, and creative narratives unfolding within both the pages of a book and the spaces of a life. The range of chapters maps a shift from the daughter-centric stories that have dominated the maternal tradition to the matrilineal and matrifocal perspectives that have emerged over the last few decades as the mother’s voice moved from silence to speech. Contributors make aesthetic, cultural, and political claims and critiques about mothering and motherhood, illuminating in new and diverse ways how authors and the protagonists of the texts “read” their own maternal identities as well as the maternal scripts of their families, cultures, and nations in their quest for self-knowledge, agency, and artistic expression.

This book attempts to read the character of Mary in the infancy narratives of Luke and Matthew alongside the lives of experiences of the Indian surrogate mother living a postcolonial India. Reading Mary through these lenses helps us see this mother and her actions in a more ambivalent light, as a mother whose love is both violent and altruistic.