From Myths to Markets

As the essays in this volume show, feminist writing has opened up ways of questioning and reinterpreting not only social life but also academic disciplines. The essays, themselves drawn from various disciplines and regions, explore epics, oral traditions, folksongs, puranic myths, prov-erbs, women’s letters, autobiographies, tribal practices, field-based information and archival sources in new and provocative ways. They bring out a range of patriarchal configurations of social reform, of work and family, the gendering of consumption, the relationship between state formations, caste and class stratification, colonial educational policies, new developmental paradigms and transformations in gender relations. In the Introduction, the editors locate these essays, not only in wider contexts, both past and present, but, more significantly, within the profounder problematic of patterns of persistence and change within patriarchies on the subcontinent. This as yet underexplored problematic they argue has the capacity to change many conventional notions of periodisation and historical transition.