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Samita Sen's history of labouring women in Calcutta in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries considers how social constructions of gender shaped their lives. Dr Sen demonstrates how - in contrast to the experience of their male counterparts - the long-term trends in the Indian economy devalued women's labour, establishing patterns of urban migration and changing gender equations within the family. She relates these trends to the spread of dowry, enforced widowhood and child marriage. The book provides insight into the lives of poor urban women who were often perceived as prostitutes or social pariahs. Even trade unions refused to address their problems and they remained on the margins of organized political protest. The study will make a signficant contribution to the understanding of the social and economic history of colonial India and to notions of gender construction.
Love, Labour and Law: Early and Child Marriage in India is a path-breaking book on an issue that has not been analysed in depth for a while, perhaps since it does not affect the elite. Today, the child brides are usually from poor families. They are of 1517 years as compared to much younger brides in the earlier times. The book discusses why child marriages persist despite numerous legislative and policy initiatives to eliminate the practice. The chapters examine social and legal reforms to raise the age of marriage; contemporary education and health-related policy attempts at prevention; relationship of child marriage with child labour, sex work, human trafficking and other issues. Increasingly, there is greater resistance to marriages arranged by parents from the child brides themselves who can now access institutional and bureaucratic support. How hopeful are these developments? The book goes beyond a simple policy focus on elimination and provides a much-needed understanding of marriage and womens agency within the context of the Indian marriage system.
The essays look at the origins and expansion of different patterns of breadwinning.
Takes an alternative look at the notion of 'wage-workers' and contributes to the development of a non-Eurocentric historiography.
Although the challenge to the hegemonic status of the institution of marriage in India is grabbing the limelight in popular media, it has received comparatively less attention in the social sciences. This path-breaking collection presents an analysis of marriage from historical, social, cultural, psychological and legal perspectives. Some of the essays argue that marriage continues to retain its prime overwhelming importance in reproducing the social order and its claim to be the only legitimate structure of the family rather than one among many. Nevertheless, changes wrought by globalisation, by information technology and by the increasing social visibility of queer life forms and practices...
Focusing primarily on the politics of jute workers in Bengal, this study explores the interaction between workers' politics, nationalist movements, and the colonial state at various levels in the period between 1890 and 1937.
Examining the 1930s and the different reactions to the crisis, this volume offers a global comparative perspective that includes a comparison across time to give insight into the contemporary global recession. Germany, Italy, Austria and Spain with their antidemocratic, authoritarian or fascistic answers to the economic crisis are compared not only to an opposite European perspective – the Swedish example – but also to other global perspectives and their political consequences in Japan, China, India, Turkey, Brazil and the United States. The book offers no recipe for economic, social or political action in today’s recession, but it shows a wide range of reactions in the past, some of which led to catastrophe.
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 locat...
This book outlines both the overlapping stories of the international birth control movement in south India, one of the strong-holds of Indian birth control advocacy, as well as the south Indian indigenization of international birth control. More than simply a supplementary narrative or case study, it argues that India's engagement with birth control remade the international scene just as India was refashioned by its engagement with international birth control.
Contributed seminar papers.