Women and Work in Precolonial India: A Reader

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A compilation of ancient Indian texts with feminist perspectives on women’s work

Women and work is an important dimension of the ongoing debate on gender parity. This book is a compilation of essays related to traditional perceptions of women’s work juxtaposed with recent feminist writings on women’s space in India’s labour history. The essays highlight the points and counterpoints of the ongoing debate on the nature, quantification and monetary valuation of women’s work.

Beginning with writings on the theme of women and work, and going on to historically plot women’s agency in labour processes, this book seeks to provide a panoramic survey of women and work in precolonial India. It is an endeavour to salvage the available data on women’s work-paid and unpaid as well as visible and less visible-in order to highlight their contribution and indicate the changes in women’s labour history.

Contents: Preface.Introduction/Vijaya Ramaswamy. I. Women and the Household: Canonical Prescriptions and their Feminist Critique: 1. The Daily Duties of Women/Julia Leslie. 2. Position and Status of Women in the Upanisads/T R Sharma. 3. Woman in the Household/M A Indra. 4. Economic Rights of Ancient Indian Women/Sukumari Bhattacharji. 5. Dynamics of Women’s Work in the Sastric Sources: Household and Beyond/Kavita Gaur. 6. Tracking Economic Transitions: Tamil Women from Tribe to Caste and Changing Production Roles/Vijaya Ramaswamy. 7.The Question of Women’s ‘Agency’: Women, Work and Domesticity in Early Textual Traditions/Jaya Tyagi. II. Women and Work in Early Textual Traditions: 8. The Woman Worker/I B Horner. 9. Of Dasas and Karmakaras: Servile Labour in Ancient India/Uma Chakravarti.10. Women and Work in Kautiliya’s Arthasastra/Upasana Dhankar. III. Women and Economic Resources: Women’s Propert Rights: 11. Proprietary Rights during Coverture/Anant Sadashiv Altekar.12. Proprietary Rights: Inheritance and Partition/Anant Sadashiv Altekar. 13. The Legal Status of Women: Their Right of Inheritance/M A Indra. 14. Property Rights of Women in Ancient India/N N Bhattachar.15. Turmeric Land: Women’s Property Rights in Tamil Society since Early Medieval Times/Kanakalatha Mukund.16. Property Rights of Women in Medieval Andhra/A Padma. IV. Contextualising Women’s Work in the Public Domain: 17. State of the Field: Perspectives on Women and Work in Early South India/Vijaya Ramaswamy. 18. Women’s Professions in Medieval Andhra/A Padma.19. Temple Women and Work in Medieval Keralam/Anna Varghese. 20. Gender, Caste and Labour: Ideological and Material Structure of Widowhood/Uma Chakravarti. 21. Work and Gender in Mughal India/Shireen Moosvi. V. Devaradiya: Hand-Maidens of God or Sex-Workers? 22. Courtesans/Vatsyayana Mallanaga. 23. Temple Women as Temple Servants/Leslie Orr. 24. In the Business of Kama: Prostitution in Classical Sanskrit Literature from the Seventh to the Thirteenth Centuries/Shalini Shah. 25. Prostitution in Ancient India/Sukumari Bhattacharji.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Vijaya Ramaswamy

Vijaya Ramaswamy is a Professor at the Centre for Historical Studies in the School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University. Ramaswamy's first book, Textiles and Weavers in Medieval South India was published by the Oxford University Press in 1985 (the second revised edition has appeared in 2006 from OUP). From economic history, she has broadened her interests to cover such varied fields as South Indian folklore, religious studies and gender studies. Oxford University Press brought out her second book, Divinity and Deviance: Women in Virasaivism in 1996. In 1997, the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla published her book, Walking Naked: Women, Society, Spirituality in South India. The book won the prestigious "Best Woman Historian" award from the Indian History Congress in 2001. In 2003, she published her first edited book, Re-searching Indian Women from Manohar Publishers, New Delhi. Her other co-edited book, Biography as History: Indian Perspectives, will be published by Orient Longman shortly. Her book, the Historical Dictionary of the Tamils is in the press and is being brought out by the Scarecrow Press, Maryland. She is an alumni of the School of Oriental and African Studies and was a Fulbright Fellow at Berkeley in California in 1988-89. Between 1992 and 1995, she researched on the spiritual history of women as a Fellow at the Indianj Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla. She was on an Indo-Canadian Fellowship at York University, Ontario in 1998. She got the prestigious UGC social scientist fellowship in 1999 and completed her book, Tamil Women from the Underside of History in 2002. She was elected the Sectional President for Medieval India in the 64th session of the Indian History Congress held at Mysore in 2003. She is currently engaged in the writing of two books - Crafts and Craftsmen in South Indian History and Tamil Myths and Legends.