Kali for Women
58 books
This selection from Ismat Chughtai's prose writing, comprising essays, commentaries and pen-portraits of her contemporaries, gives the reader a good idea of the artistic, political and social mores of her times. It also serves as a background to her own work and furnishes insights into the art and lives of her contemporaries. Chughtai's involvement with the Progressive Writers' Association and her friendship with writers like Sa'dat Hasan Manto, Patras Bokhari, ...
This collection of nine essays examines the agency of women as the producers and patrons of art, crafts and architecture in India in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Tracing the emergence of female artists and female patrons, it analyses both the embrace of feminist principles and its rejection as a framework for social action.
It also examines how women—supposedly invisible and denied positions of prominence in the public sphere—gained ...
This compilation of almost 100 maps is put together using data from the 1991 Census of India. The Atlas maps a regional geography of women and men, using indicators as diverse as literacy, education, voting patterns, cultural groupings, fertility rates, workforce participation etc. The aim is to provide information based on Census data which can help demonstrate the diversity of women's lives in India, and to provide it in such a way that readers/users can ...
One cruel night, young Meggie's father, Mo, reads aloud from Inkheart and an evil ruler named Capricorn escapes the boundaries of fiction and lands in their living room. Suddenly, Meggie is smack in the middle of the kind of adventure she has only read about in books. Somehow, Meggie and Mo must learn to harness the magic that conjured this nightmare. Somehow they must change the course of the story that has changed their lives forever.
"Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasrin’s first major work in exile, My Girlhood is a sensitive retelling of her growing up as part of an extended family in Bangladesh and erstwhile East Pakistan. The pictures emerge like flashes from a colourful kaleidoscope, creating a brilliant image as the author moves back and forth between her own life and that of a fledgling nation. A child like innocence and freshness pervades her sharp observations of Bangladeshi ...
Using the contemporary workings of property law in India through the lives and thoughts of middle-class and poor women, this is a study of the ways in which cultural practices, and particularly notions of gender ideology guide the workings of law. It urges a close reading of decisions by women that appear to be contrary to material interests and that reinforce patriarchal ideologies. The Hindu succession act was passed in India in 1956 theoretically giving Indian ...
This book provides a holistic analysis of the gendered nature of armed conflict and political violence, and a broader understanding of the complex, changing roles and power relations between women and men during such circumstances. Currently, armed conflict and political violence are predominantly viewed as ‘male domains’, perpetrated by men acting as soldiers, guerrillas, paramilitaries or peacemakers. The involvement of women has received far less ...
This book explores the development of nationalism in Sri Lanka during the past century, particularly with in the dominant Sinhala Buddhist and militant Tamil movements. Tracing the ways women from diverse backgrounds have engaged with nationalism, Neloufer de Mel argues that gender is crucial to an understanding of nationlism and vice versa. Traversing both the colonial and postcolonial periods in Sri Lanka’s history, the author assesses a range of writers, ...
National security and militarism have traditionally been male domains and the theory and policy of national security, of war and peace, have been formulated, executed and narrated by men. This book traces the course of militarism in several South Asian states, with a more detailed account of women’s experiences of it in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. Women in South Asia have borne the brunt of militarism in a number of ways but especially because, ...
THE FALL of communist regimes in Eastern Europe and of dictatorships in Latin America brought new attention to democratic movements worldwide. Most interest focused on national activities, electoral politics and the expansion of capitalist markets, and though much has been written about social movements, the connections between women’s grassroots organizations and democratization have been neglected. This book explores how these movements contribute to the ...
Kashmir has been, for some years, a key issue on the Indian political map. More than a decade of conflict has deeply affected people’s livelihoods and living environments, their health, their eating habits, their work and workplaces, their access to education. The impact of these things is felt most sharply in the lives of women, and yet, few discussions on Kashmir pay attention to this. This book reflects the range of women’s experiences in this conflict. ...
This timely volume brings together the work of some of India’s leading feminist economists, historians, political scientists, journalists and anthropologists to investigate the contemporary situation of women in India. It focuses on four broad domains: the cultural, the social, the political and the economic. The writers argue that despite apparently positive indicators of progress in education and paid employment, women’s status has not improved. They point ...
The essays in this volume address theoretical and ethnographic issues concerning oral traditions and women’s speech in diverse South Asian Communities in North and South India and Nepal. Grounded in an awareness of the colonial, postcolonial and academic textualizations that so often have prevented women’s speech from being heard or their silences understood, the papers work towards an interpretation of women’s expressive genres as responding critically to ...
Terror is a matter of fact. Globally. Long before the attacks on the World Trade Center on September, 11, 2001, large parts of the world had lived with and resisted terrorisms that often masqueraded as liberation struggles: Sri Lanka, Bosnia, Rwanda, Northern Ireland, Algeria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Palestine/Israel… Women across the world have spoken out against terrorism, militarism and violence of all kinds as an unacceptable strategy for resolving ...
The self-respect movement launched by Periyar (E.V. Ramasami Naiker) in 1926 questioned the ways in which the lower castes were systematically excluded from the Indian nation and constructed as the ‘Other’ by the Brahmin elites. While Periyar’s role within the movement has received critical and scholarly attention, women self-respecters and the issues they raised have gone largely unnoticed. This collection of essays and fiction by women self-respecters ...
On September 1, 1995, Tibetan nationalism and international feminism came together in front of a global audience when nine exiled Tibetan women staged a demonstration at the United Nations Fourth World Conference on women in Beijing. From the Tibetan perspective, the women had created history by becoming the first Tibetans ever to hold a protest on Chinese soil. This book traces the history of organized political resistance by Tibetan women over the 40-year ...
One of the grand 'singing ladies' who began their lives in the first quarter of the twentieth century, Malka Pukhraj was educated in Urdu, Persian, music and dance. These latter two became her life and she began her career as a court singer in the erstwhile princely state of Jammu and Kashmir, going on to become an independent performer, whose voice and words are now familiar to millions in the subcontinent. In this remarkable, witty and candid account, Malka ...
"The women's movement in India has a long and rich history in which millions of women live, work and struggle to survive in order to remake their family, home and social lives. Whether fighting for safe contraception, literacy, water and electricity of resisting sexual harassment, they are participating in vibrant and active women's movements that are thriving in many parts of India today. "Fields of Protest explores the political and cultural ...
"The absence of gender awareness in policy and planning in the past has given rise to a variety of efficiency, welfare and equity costs. This book develops an analytical framework and a set of tools which can assist planners, as well as trainers, to ensure that gender is systematically integrated into different aspects of their work. It offers an inventory of the kinds of assumptions which lead to gender-blind policy, and assesses integrationist and ...
Why is 'feminist' a label that some liberal, emancipated women recoil from? Why is feminism often associated with aggressive women who disrupt social norms and harmonious families? This book brings together the writing of prominent Indian academics and activists as they debate the issue in the context of Indian culture, society and politics, and explore the theoretical foundations of feminism here. The inevitability of the association with western feminism, the ...
"Has there been a 'conspiracy of silence' regarding sexuality in India, be it within social movements or as a focus of scholarship? A question of silence? interrogates this assumption in order to thematise a crucial field. Prefaced by a detailed introductory overview, the essays use diverse perspectives to develop an understanding of the institutions, practices and forms of representation of sexual relations and their boundaries of legitimacy. From ...
In the aftermath of the political upheavals of the 1970s, many who suffered for their political convictions have recounted the ruthless tyranny of those dark times in prison memoirs. Here, Joya Mitra recalls the less fortunate ones, the ones she left behind. These are portraits of women who overstepped the boundaries of social norms sometimes unknowingly, but most often because they were deprived of all choice, women who were banished from society and kept in ...
Resisting the Sacred and the Secular: Women's Activism and Politicised Religion in South Asia focuses on women's agency and activism within the South Asian context, and is an outstanding contribution to the field of gender studies. It explores the paradoxical relationship of women to religious politics in India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. Contrary to the hopes of feminists, many women have responded to religious nationalist appeals; contrary to the hopes ...