Stree
28 books
This is the first of four readers for students of women’s studies, particularly for Masters’ level courses in women’s studies, and more generally across undergraduate and certificate courses as the concept of ‘gender’ has been introduced at all levels of curricula. The reader reflects many of the concerns that have come up in women’s studies across two decades. This first volume focuses on some of the major economic and social ...
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. Changes wrought by globalization, by information technology and by the increasing social visibility of queer life forms and ...
Sarmistha Dutta Gupta is a scholar, translator and activist who has published earlier with Stree has a new book out. In Identities and Histories: Politics and Women’s Writings in Bengal she explores the interface between women’s writing and politics and studies gender identities in their shifting interrelations with other categories of identity like class and religion. Focusing on what Bengali middle-class women wrote in leading literary and political ...
Addressing students and the general reader, Theorizing Feminism series introduces key concepts in feminist theory. Any reader will find the series vitally useful, not just for understanding what new theories mean and how they are used but also for grasping how they have evolved.Examining the crucial linkages between caste and gender, undertaken, perhaps, for the first time, Uma Chakravarti unmasks the mystique of consensus in the workings of the caste system to ...
This collection of early writings of Malayalee women, translated for the first time into English, give us, in the words of V Geetha, texts that dazzle. Written between 1898-1938, they reveal the vigorous debate over modern gender relations that was taking place in this period. Women reflected on what was Womanly, on education, duties, vocation and civil roles, an ongoing discussion, first influenced by reformism and later by nationalist and communist ideas, which ...
Women all over South Asia experience a common predicament when it comes to the religious-personal laws of their communities that ‘normalize’ their exclusion and emphasize their inferior status vis-?-vis men. All matters of marriage, divorce, custody, maintenance and inheritance fall under religious-personal laws, which combined with customary practices, perpetuate injustice and suffering. Focusing on the position of women within the state, law and religion, ...
Addressing students and the general reader, this series introduces key concepts in feminist theory. Any reader will find the series vitally useful, not just for understanding what new theories mean and how they are used but also for grasping how they have evolved. In her incisive discussion V. Geetha points out that ‘gender is everywhere’, and when we allocate to the male and female sexes, specific and distinctive attributes and roles, we are ‘doing’ ...
In this book, the trauma of the Partition in Eastern India is discussed explicitly in a way that has not happened before. Drawing upon interviews with women who were uprooted from old East Bengal, on diaries, memoirs and creative literature, the editors lift the veil of silence that has surrounded the Bengal Partition of 1947. The lack of overt public discourse has meant that people outside Bengal have tendeedto believe that the impact was very much less on the ...
How do cultures define education, especially female education? Sita Anantha Raman explains how perceptions change, how women's lives are affected, and how the new dispensation still remains directed by the male view of the educated woman. As the colonial government policy changed towards intervention, urged on by Western mission-aries, government officials and South Indian men-the latter being the product of Western-style education--women were seen as almost all ...
Translated for the first time from the Bengali, this astonishingly radical novel is about Chhobi, a gutsy, misfit girl from a rural landowning family, who questions injustice, fights to share the privileges offered to her brother and male cousins, and refuses to see her future as just another submissive household drudge. Nabankur means a new seedling, which is personified by Chhobi, who is growing up in the late 1930s and the early 1940s in Bengal where ...
These English translations from the Gujarati bring Saroj Pathak’s work to a wider audience, giving it the greater attention it deserves. Delving deep into the human mind, the stories depict the pitfalls of communication, the infinite possibilities of misunderstanding, of doubt and despair. At the same time they celebrate the human psyche’s ability to bridge these chasms and make connections, of love, understanding, and friendship. Pathak considers the ...
Fluid Bonds makes gender visible in the various ways water is dealt with, and questions how these ways affect gender and how gender affects the views on water. The connections between gender and water are multifaceted, contingent and heterogeneous. Through a rich offering of case studies, it identifies the multiple and changing relationships between the two, and notes some commonalities whilst gendering the use and management of water. The streams of ...
Sabitri Roy’s trilogy, Paka Dhaner Gan, translated for the first time into English, provides as epic panorama of rural Bengal of the late 1930s and the 1940s, encompassing the freedom movement, war, and the Tebhaga movement, the peasants’ uprising against unjust taxes by the zamindars or landlords. Spanning generations, this story shows how the struggle changed rural Bengal. The peasants and their leaders took ideas of equality into the fields, sometimes ...
How is gender ideology reproduced in adivasi societies? How far can gender constructions be instrumental in perpetuating women's subjugation and exploitation? Focusing upon Chotanagpur, now a part of the newly formed state of Jharkhand, Shashank Sinha tries to raise questions that are of paramount concern yet are so peripheral in the existing studies on tribes and gender. Investigating traditions, an area largely ignored by historians and social scientists, Sinha ...
Translated for the first time into English, these two plays by Saoli Mitra, a distinguished actor of the Bengali stage, are both based on the Mahabharata. Draupadi’s story is narrated in Five Lords, Yet None a Protector (Nathabati Ananthabat). Married to the five royal Pandav brothers, she is defenceless even in their presence, sexually humiliated by the Kauravs, her husbands’ cousins and rival claimants for the throne. In Timeless Tales (Katha Amritasaman), ...
As Tanika Sarkar states succinctly in this anthology, around the middle of the nineteenth century, a social category was born in Bengal, along with a new world that named it: lekhika or the female author. These writings, translated for the first time from the Bengali, are by women who were amongst the earliest to receive a modern education and become members of the reading and writing public. Women wrote on a wide variety of concerns, in the many journals that ...
Chanda presents a survey taken of middle class women like herself in two cities, Calcutta and Jamshedpur, in three languages, English, Bangla and Hindi, who picked texts from the popular media that represented their lives and belief systems. Ipshita Chanda suggests provocatively that it is in popular culture that the discourses of modernity, feminism and progress, all articulated by the women’s movement, become lived realities. Looking at popular women’s ...
Agriculture in India is in crisis with the out-migration of men from farming to towns, cities or other rural areas in search of work, leaving the running of farms to women. The resulting 'feminization' has ominous implications for food security and rural livelihoods. Women seem to be in a no-win situation where work burdens and responsibilities have inclusive without enhancement of productivity or earnings. While the economic importance of land has declined (its ...
Investigating the impact of globalization on women workers in India, this book demystifies the phenomenon of globalization, offering an overview of its prime drivers, processes and forces. Four sectoral studies of women workers are provided: two on factory women in garment exports and electronics; the third on home-based workers in a range of manufacturing processes and industries; and the fourth on middle class women working in Information Technology Enabled ...