Identities in South Asia

2019

We certify that we have read this dissertation and approved it as adequate in scope and quality. We have found that it is complete and satisfactory in all respects, and that any and all revisions required by the final examining committee have been made.

The pace of socio-economic transformation in India over the past two and a half decades has been formidable. In this volume we are concerned with examining how these transformations have played out at the level of everyday life to influence the lives of Indian women, and gender relations more broadly. The 15 chapters in Women, Gender and Everyday Social Transformation in India conceive of these ongoing everyday transformatory churnings as undercurrents that play out well below the radar screen of the national and international media, and beyond the realm of the spectacular. To analyse these everyday transformatory churnings our authors look closely and ethnographically at a diversity of everyday 'sites of change in which macro-structural processes of social transformation interface with everyday life-worlds to generate new contestations and contradictions that impinge directly on the everyday lives of ordinary Indian women, and on the relations between genders. In doing so, they combine to identify the ambiguous, contradictory and contested co-existence of discrepant gendered norms, values and visions in a society caught up in wider processes of social transformation. They also provide us with some cause for cautious optimism. Thus, while much of the current debate on women and social change in India is, for very good reasons, dominated by the pessimism triggered by the apparent increase in brutal sexualised violence against women, and the very low child sex ratio that makes India 'a terrible place for girls cf. also Jha et al. 2006;, the chapters in Women, Gender and Everyday Social Transformation in India paint a more composite and contradictory picture. The past 10 to 20 years have seen an increasing number of women moving out of the domestic domain and into the 'public' domains of education, work and politics (Reddy 2012); female literacy has gone up; more women pursue higher education and are an increasingly common sight on buses, in cafes, markets and other public spaces in the big cities; new and affordable communication technologies blur the gendered boundaries between the private and the public; there is greater participation of women in economic activity in the cities; the large number of women elected to village and municipal councils across the country give women a permanent political voice; there is a strong women's movement; and in some states women now 'out-vote' the men. These changes, we argue in this book, are deeply implicated in everyday lives and have had a considerable, if contradictory, impact on how Indian women and men live, work and dream. We have organised the 15 chapters in Women, Gender and Everyday Social Transformation in India under three topical headings: (1) Work, technology, aspirations; (2) democracy and the developmental state; and (3) assertions and activism. The key questions that we address include: How does women's ability to participate in an increasingly globalised and volatile Indian labour market alter the terrain upon which gender relations are negotiated and organised? How does the entry of new technologies into everyday life domains alter the relationship between men and women, and between the private and the public? How do global cultural flows impinge on local imaginaries and desires to reconfigure subjectivities? Does the growing policy focus on maternal health change local views of women and motherhood? How is contemporary Indian feminism articulated and contested? And how does women's grassroots political activism reconfigure gender relations and practices?

Gender and Class, 2017

Structure 2.1 Introduction 2.2 Objectives 2.3 Context: Gender and Class in Indian Writing 2.4 Women and Class in Early 20 th Century Literature 2.5 Women and the Great Indian Middle Class 2.6 'Hunger': Poverty and Sexual Exploitation 2.7 Breast Tales 2.8 Let Us Sum Up 2.9 Unit End Questions 2.10 References 2.11 Suggested Readings

International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 2017

Annals of the Association of …, 2004

Drawing on fourteen months' ethnographic field research in western Uttar Pradesh among educated Dalit (exuntouchable) and Muslim young men, this article uncovers a crisis in educated people's access to salaried employment in rural north India. Against the grain of other studies of youth underemployment in postcolonial settings, we argue that educated Muslim and Dalit young men have reacted to their exclusion from secure whitecollar occupations by embracing education as a form of embodied cultural distinction rather than seeking out ''traditional,'' ''indigenous,'' or ''village-based'' identities. Young men elaborate on education's value with reference to a system of differences between moral, civilized, developed ''educated'' people and immoral, savage, underdeveloped ''illiterates.'' Education has become a type of discursive ''scaffold'' upon which people display their ideas about morality, development, and respect. These narratives are compromised and contested and highlight differences in the ability of Muslim and Dalit young men to maintain an image of themselves as educated people. The extraordinary durability of local ideas of development (vikās) in the face of poor occupational outcomes and local variations in young people's ability to maintain development identities point to the importance of the cultural production of education as a field for comparative geographical enquiry.

Educational Administration Theory and Practice Journal, 2024

This paper delves into the intricate relationship between men and women within the Indian societal framework, focusing on historical and sociological perspectives. Despite the universally accepted principle of gender equality, Indian society reflects a complex interplay of socioeconomic conditions, policies, practices, and cultural norms that have historically positioned women in subordinate roles. The paper provides a chronological examination of the status of Hindu women from the Vedic period (1500 BCE-500 BCE) through to the end of British rule in 1947, highlighting key aspects of their lives, including childhood, education, marriage, divorce, and property rights. The paper examines practices such as child marriage, dowry, and female infanticide, emphasizing their impact on women's societal roles and opportunities for education. Furthermore, the paper sheds light on legislative efforts made during British rule to address these issues and their limited success due to persistent societal biases. In conclusion, the paper underscores the importance of recognizing the historical and cultural dimensions of gender inequality to effectively address and dismantle the structures that sustain it.

In Forging the Ideal Educated Girl, Shenila Khoja-Moolji traces the figure of the ‘educated girl’ to examine the evolving politics of educational reform and development campaigns in colonial India and Pakistan. She challenges the prevailing common sense associated with calls for women’s and girls’ education and argues that such advocacy is not simply about access to education but, more crucially, concerned with producing ideal Muslim woman-/girl-subjects with specific relationships to the patriarchal family, paid work, Islam, and the nation-state. Thus, discourses on girls’/ women’s education are sites for the construction of not only gender but also class relations, religion, and the nation.