Towards Gender History: Images, Identities an Roles of North Indian Women

This book is significant contribution to the ambitious project on gender history as it has tried to capture and document crucial turning as it has tried to capture and document crucial turning -points in Indian women’s consciousness  in the course of their transformation from objects to subjects. The have been portrayed in their serious engagement with the problem of relating and reconciling the redefinition of Indian self-hood (especially male identity) with the reformulation of images, identities and roles of women in the course of their participation in the national freedom struggle against the British imperialist rule. Unlike their European counterpart, these women from the Hindu and Sikh middle classes chose to carry on their crusade for gender justice and space in public life without belligerence against men and thus won active support ad goodwill of male leadership. The Geographical scope of the intensively researched essays in this book is limited to North India particularly Panjab (excluding the Princely states) in view of the regionally differentiated intervention of the British colonialism in various regions of India. Despite its limitation in terms of representativeness, these essays are glued together by the author’s concern for documenting continuities and changes in images, identifies and roles of women in north India with special reference to Panjab. The book is composed of three distinct strands: (i) male-led reform projects in the nineteenth century; (ii) women as active agents in recasting their own identities and roles; and (iii) their gains and predicaments as they live through the democratic experiment and make sense of the Euro-American project of globalization and its implications for their status and empowernment. The choice of the source -material has been guided by the author’s objective of writing contributory history. Since gender history does not exclusively belong to the realm of cultural history, these essays draw their raw material from a variety of sources" archival including official and non-official, published and unpublished in combination with oral tradition and its allied sources. Another important source consists of women’s writings their diaries, speeches and feminist magazines.