Towards Gender History : Images, Identities and Roles of North Indian Women: With Special Reference to Punjab
Contents: Preface. Acknowledgements. Introduction. I. Reforming Women: 1. Conceptualizing women in the Sikh religious tradition and beyond. 2. Clamping shutters and valorizing women: tensions in sculpting gender identities in the colonial Punjab. II. New images, identities and roles: 3. Fashioning minds and images: a case study of Stree Darpan (1909-1928). 4. Jallianwala Bagh Tragedy: the catalyst of Indian women's consciousness. III. Between democracy and globalization: 5. Jawaharlal Nehru on democracy and women. 6. Globalization and cultural invasion: its implications for Indian men and women. Bibliography. Index.
"This book is a significant contribution to the ambitious project on gender history as it has tried to capture and document crucial turning-points in Indian women's consciousness in the course of their transformation from objects to subjects. They have been portrayed in their serious engagement with the problem of relating and reconciling the redefinition of Indian self-hood (especially male identity) with the reformulation of images, identities and roles of women in the course of their participation in the national freedom struggle against the British imperialist rule. Unlike their European counterpart, these women from the Hindu and Sikh middle classes chose to carry on their crusade for gender justice and space in public life without belligerence against men and thus won active support and goodwill of male leadership.
The geographical scope of the intensively researched essays in this book is limited to North India particularly Punjab (excluding the princely states) in view of the regionally differentiated intervention of the British colonialism in various regions of India. Despite its limitation in terms of representativeness, these essays are glued together by the author's concern for documenting continuities and changes in images, identities and roles of women in North India with special reference to Punjab. The book is composed of three distinct strands: (i) male-led reform projects in the nineteenth century; (ii) women as active agents in recasting their own identities and roles; and (iii) their gains and predicaments as they live through the democratic experiment and make sense of the Euro-American project of globalization and its implications for their status and empowerment.
The choice of the source-material has been guided by the author's objective of writing contributory history. Since gender history does not exclusively belong to the realm of cultural history, these essays draw their raw material from a variety of sources: archival including official and non-official, published and unpublished in combination with oral tradition and its allied sources. Another important source consists of women's writings their diaries speeches and feminist magazines." (jacket)
