Author Description

Gender in Modern India brings together pioneering research on a range of themes, including masculinity and sexuality; social reforms, caste, and contestations; Adivasis, patriarchy, and colonialism; capitalism, political economy, and labour; health, medical care, and institution building; culture and identity; and migration and its new dynamics. Commissioned in remembrance of the prolific social historian Biswamoy Pati, this volume examines the gender question through a multi-layered and multi-dimensional frame in which interdisciplinarity and intersectionality play an important role. Using case studies on gender from diverse geographies -- east, west, north, south, and northeast; community locations -- Hindu, Muslim, and Christian; and marginalized socio-economic or ethnic habitations such as those of Dalits and Adivasis, the contributors highlight the complexities and diversities of women's negotiations of patriarchies in varied, social, ethnic, and community contexts. Collectively, the chapters in this volume focus on three related and overlapping settings -- colonial, colonial and postcolonial continuum, and postcolonial. They delineate the multiple lives of gender by focusing on its intersections with other markers of difference, including race, class, caste, sexuality, culture, ethnicity, region, and occupation to acquire new meanings and forms, thereby questioning stereotypes, challenging dated notions and interpretations of gender, and demonstrating the ubiquity of patriarchy.