Women Speak Nation

Panchali Ray is an independent researcher based in New Delhi, India. She is the author of Politics of Precarity: Gendered Subjects and the Health Care Industry in Contemporary Kolkata. Her areas of interest include labour, migration, violence, sexualities, and collective politics.

"This collection of essays is a fascinating snapshot of the relationship between women and nation in present-day India. The essays, which focus on topics spanning crimes against women, women's dissent, and how the fragility of the environment and development affects women, are a powerful admonition of the political landscape of 21st-century India."Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty; professionals.--J. M. Morris, Mount St. Joseph University, CHOICE, March 2020 Vol. 57 No. 5

• Women speak nation: an introduction PART I Gender, nation, and nationalism 1 Women and nation revisited 2 The Verma Committee report, 2013: notes on nation, gender, and crime 3 The gendered nation: to be recoded or rejected? PART II Class-caste-community: negotiating the secular, the liberal, and the modern 4 Shia women and their ‘place-making’: gendered agency in the Muharram gatherings in Kolkata 5 Speaking in a different voice: Dalit women writing in Bengali 6 Dance of dissent: dancing Tagore in the age of nationalism PART III Women’s movement(s), representations, and resistances 7 Towards reparative readings: reflections on feminist solidarities in a troubling present 8 Political motherhood and a spectacular resistance: (Re)examining the Kangla Fort Protest, Manipur 9 ‘Their’ suicide letter: an exercise in reading that is always incomplete 10 Inside/out: women’s movement and women in movements PART IV Voices of dissent 11 Resisting AFSPA, fighting the nation: an interview with Irom Sharmila Chanu 12 Narratives from Bastar: an interview with Soni Sori 13 Living in Curfewland: Kashmir 2016 14 Coal mining and ecological fragility: questioning development, questioning growth 15 Tale of a Brahmin and a Shudrani