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Identities and Histories
Sarmistha Dutta Gupta 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 journals of the 1920s to the 1950s, Probasi, Saogat, Jayashree, Mandira, Gharey-Bairey and in the daily newspaper of the Communist Party of India, Swadhinata, the author interrogates the fashioning of different kinds of selfhood of women through papers subscribing to different ideologies. Literary journals like the prestigious Probasi, founded and edited by Ramananda Chatterji from 1901, saw women as equal bu...
Revolutionary Desires
Revolutionary Desires examines the lives and subjectivities of militant-nationalist and communist women in India from the late 1920s, shortly after the communist movement took root, to the 1960s, when it fractured. This close study demonstrates how India's revolutionary women shaped a new female – and in some cases feminist – political subject in the twentieth century, in collaboration and contestation with Indian nationalist, liberal-feminist, and European left-wing models of womenhood. Through a wide range of writings by, and about, revolutionary and communist women, including memoirs, autobiographies, novels, party documents, and interviews, Ania Loomba traces the experiences of these women, showing how they were constrained by, but also how they questioned, the gendered norms of Indian political culture. A collection of carefully restored photographs is dispersed throughout the book, helping to evoke the texture of these women’s political experiences, both public and private. Revolutionary Desires is an original and important intervention into a neglected area of leftist and feminist politics in India by a major voice in feminist studies.
Walking Out, Speaking Up
An energetic era of feminist street theatre in India: 1979 onwards. Stunning, audacious plays vividly portray abuse, murder and everyday sexism, raise profound questions, disrupting the normative. Public performance embodies resistance, shattering the mould of docile, invisible women. Rhythms of tambourines, drums, songs fill the air, stories are enacted, insights communicated, challenging entrenched patriarchies, evoking audience response, sparking change. A remarkable repertoire of plays unfolded across geographical and social contexts: Om Swaha, Ehsaas, Mulgi Zali Ho, Intezaar, Teri Meri Kahani, Hum Awaz Uthayeinge and hundreds more. Weaving social critique with intimate felt experience, ...
Mahasweta Devi in Defence of the Human
This book re-thinks the literary and social worlds of Mahasweta Devi, the prolific and influential writer and social activist, in connection to her praxis. It brings into focus Devi’s preoccupation with the human, nature and life, and unwritten or distorted histories that underline her poetics of translating resistance in terms of a radical alterity. The defining feature of Devi’s writings is the position she adopts in defence of the human, questioning the nature of the ‘abject’ in her discourse on the oppressed. Essays in this volume focus on her subversive retellings from the Mahabharata, the political aspects of translation/adaptation of her works in literature, cinema and visual ...
LITERATURE AS A SITE OF ACTIVISM: A SELECT STUDY OF WOMEN WRITING IN INDIA
In the study, Literature as a Site of Activism: A Select Study of Women Writing in India, an attempt is made to bring the well known contemporary women writers who are very much part of the mainstream society. These women writers use their fictional as well as their non-fictional writings to exhibit their activist concern. They use their writings to criticize certain social happenings. Though the writers hail from different parts of our country, the issues raised by them in their writings unify them. Their concern over various issues is discussed in a particular sense here.
The Refugee Woman
The Refugee Woman examines the Partition of 1947 by engaging with the cultural imagination of the ‘refugee woman’ in West Bengal, particularly in three significant texts of the Partition of Bengal—Ritwik Ghatak’s film Meghe Dhaka Tara; and two novels, Jyotirmoyee Devi’s Epar Ganga, Opar Ganga and Sabitri Roy’s Swaralipi. It shows that the figure of the refugee woman, animated by the history of the political left and refugee movements, and shaped by powerful cultural narratives, can contest and reconstitute the very political imagination of ‘woman’ that emerged through the long history of dominant cultural nationalisms. The reading it offers elucidates some of the complexities of nationalist, communal, and communist gender-politics of a key period in post-independence Bengal.
A Matter of Taste
A delectable collection of writing on food and its place in our lives that brings together some of the most significant Indian voices over the last century. From lavish meals, modern diets and cooking lessons that serve as a rite of passage to fake fasts and real ones, fish, feni, and fiery meals that smack of revenge, this book has something to satisfy every palate. Gandhi's guilt-ridden account of his failed flirtation with eating meat starkly complements Ruchir Joshi's toast to the senses as he describes his characters discovering a truly alternative use for some perfectly innocent shrikhand. In unique gastronomic takes on history, Salman Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh and Saadat Hasan Manto ensure that we will never look at chutney, a Tibetan momo or jelly in quite the same way again.
Women and the Romance of the Word
Around the middle of the 19th century, woman emerges as a new sign disrupting the cultural economy of Bengal and reversing and realigning conventional notions and expectations of woman's agency and power. The colonial interface would have been important because a need for women's overall development was felt amongst the male intelligentsia of the period and some of the key texts that circulated at the beginning of the 19th century were Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), Thomas Paine's Rights of Man (1791), James Mill's History of British India (1817), Richard Carlile's Every Woman's Book (1826) and William Thompson's Appeal of One Half the Human Race, Women, aga...
Urbanisation in Bengal
This volume presents a comprehensive study of the urbanization of Bengal from ancient to postcolonial times. It analyses the notion of urban space, examines the institutions which constitute the ‘urban’, and explores the crises brought about by the Partition. The book highlights the key features of urbanization in colonial Bengal––the print culture, institutions of Western education and Western medicine, and the census as a ‘modern form of knowledge’. It also looks at the refugee movement and discusses the contribution of Partition refugees in urbanizing Bengal. Rich in archival sources, this book will be indispensable for scholars and researchers of urban history, urban studies, Indian history, colonial history, postcolonial studies, partition studies, and South Asian history, particularly those interested in Bengal.
Giving Away the Girl and Other Plays
A volume of three street plays from the women s movement, written in the 1980s and widely performed as part of the cultural activism of the time. Giving Away the Girl and The Monkey Dance are both anti-dowry plays. Why All This Bloodshed is a play written in the wake of the widely-debated Shah Bano case in India in the mid-80s, centring around a Muslim woman s right to maintenance. All the plays remain remarkably relevant, opening up key issues of the movement in a complex and nuanced manner, facilitating debate rather than offering simplistic solutions. Brought together for the first time with an introductory essay by the playwright and a note by filmmaker and activist Madhusree Dutt, who d...
