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.

The pace of socioeconomic transformation in India over the past two and a half decades has been formidable. This volume sheds light on how these transformations have played out at the level of everyday life to influence the lives of Indian women, and gender relations more broadly. Through ethnographically grounded case studies, the authors portray the contradictory and contested co-existence of discrepant gendered norms, values and visions in a society caught up in wider processes of sociopolitical change. ‘Women, Gender and Everyday Social Transformation in India’ moves the debate on gender and social transformation into the domain of everyday life to arrive at locally embedded and detailed, ethnographically informed analyses of gender relations in real-life contexts that foreground both subtle and not-so-subtle negotiations and contestations.

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.

Women, Gender and History in India examines Indian history through a thematic lens of women and gender across different contexts. Through an inter-disciplinary approach, Nita Kumar uses sources from literature, folklore, religion, and art to discuss historical and anthropological ways of interpreting the issues surrounding women and gender in history. As part of the scholarly movement away from a Grand Narrative of South Asian history and culture, this volume places emphasis on the diversity of women and their experiences. It does this by including analyses of many different primary sources together with discussion around a wide variety of theoretical and methodological debates – from the mixed role of colonial law and education to the conundrum of a patriarchy that worships the Goddess while it strives to keep women in subservience. This textbook is essential reading for those studying Indian history and women and gender studies.

In a pathbreaking study of the gendering of the practices of history, Bonnie Smith examines the differences in19th-century approaches to history between male and female perspectives. Smith demonstrates that even today, the practice of history is still propelled by fantasies of power and subjugation.

This book covers a range of issues and phenomena around gender-related violence in specific cultural and regional conditions. Using an interdisciplinary approach, it discusses historical and contemporary developments that trigger violence while highlighting the social conditions, practices, discourses, and cultural experiences of gender-related violence in India. Beginning with the issues of gender-based violence within the traditional context of Indian history and colonial encounters, it moves on to explore the connections between gender, minorities, marginalisation, sexuality, and violence, especially violence against Dalit women, disabled women, and transgender people. It traces and interprets similarities and differences as well as identifies social causes of potential conflicts. Further, it investigates the forms and mechanisms of political, economic, and institutional violence in the legitimation or de-legitimation of traditional gender roles. The chapters deal with sexual violence, violence within marriage and family, influence of patriarchal forces within factory-based gender violence, and global processes such as demand-driven surrogacy and the politics of literary and cinematic representations of gender-based violence. The book situates relevant debates about India and underlines the global context in the making of the gender bias that leads to violence both in the public and private domains. An important contribution to feminist scholarship, this book will be useful to scholars and researchers of gender studies, women’s studies, history, sociology, and political science.

An interrogation of the uses of gender as a tool for cultural and historical analysis. The revised edition reassesses the book's fundamental topic: the category of gender. In arguing that gender no longer serves to destabilize our understanding of sexual difference, the new preface and new chapter open a critical dialogue with the original book. From publisher description.

At what age do girls gain the maturity to make sexual choices? This question provokes especially vexed debates in India, where early marriage is a widespread practice. India has served as a focal problem site in NGO campaigns and intergovernmental conferences setting age standards for sexual maturity. Over the last century, the country shifted the legal age of marriage from twelve, among the lowest in the world, to eighteen, at the high end of the global spectrum. Ashwini Tambe illuminates the ideas that shaped such shifts: how the concept of adolescence as a sheltered phase led to delaying both marriage and legal adulthood; how the imperative of population control influenced laws on marriage age; and how imperial moral hierarchies between nations provoked defensive postures within India. Tambe takes a transnational feminist approach to legal history, showing how intergovernmental debates influenced Indian laws and how expert discourses in India changed UN terminology about girls. Ultimately, Tambe argues, the well-meaning focus on child marriage has been tethered less to the interests of girls themselves and more to parents’ interests, achieving population control targets, and preserving national reputation.

"During the colonial period, Indian intellectuals--philologists, lawyers, scientists and literary figures--all sought to hold a mirror to their country. Whether they wrote novels, polemics, or scientific treatises, all sought a better understanding of society in general and their society in particular. Curiously, female sexuality and sexual behavior play an outside role in their writing. The figure of the prostitute is ubiquitous in everything from medical texts and treatises on racial evolution to anti-Muslim polemic and studies of ancient India. In this book, Durba Mitra argues that between the 1840s and the 1940s, the new science of sexuality became foundational to the scientific study of Indian social progress. The colonial state and an emerging set of Bengali male intellectuals extended the regulation of sexuality to far-reaching projects that sought to define what society should look like and how modern citizens should behave. An exploration of this history of social scientific thought offers new perspectives to understand the power of paternalistic and deeply violent claims about sexual norms in the postcolonial world today. These histories reveal the enduring authority of scientific claims to a tradition that equates social good with the control of women's free will and desire. Thus, they managed to dramatically reorganize their society around upper-caste Hindu ideals of strict monogamy"--