Kumkum Sangari – författare

"This collection fills a very long felt need, a fact which is reinforced by the generally very high quality of the contributions and the fast-growing reputation in international feminist circles of many of the authors."--Arjun Appadurai, University of PennsylvaniaThe political and social life of India in the last decade has given rise to a variety of questions concerning the nature and resilience of patriarchal systems in a transitional and post-colonial society. The contributors to this interdisciplinary volume recognize that every aspect of reality is gendered, and that such a recognition involves a dismantling of the ideological presuppositions of the so-called gender neutral ideologies, as well as the boundaries of individual disciplines.The first set of essays seeks to analyze the patriarchal discourses of a colonial society and includes an analysis of the shaping of Hindu-Aryan identity, the parameters of the discourse on widow-immolation, the "defeminization" of popular culture in nineteenth-century urban Calcutta, the nature of the reforms proposed by early women's journals in Hindi, and the implications of the nationalist movement and of Indo-Anglian leterature on middle-class patriarchal norms.The second set of articles relates to women of the productive classes--the reconstitution of patriarchies in the agrarian transition in Haryana, in the Oudh peasant movement, in the armed peasant struggle in Telangana, and among the working class in Bengal. The contributors explore the interrelation of patriarchies with political economy, law, religion, and culture, and suggest a different history of "reform" movements, and of class and gender relations.

This collection of essays covers a broad range of disciplines to produce a work that rethinks relationships and divisions in gender, geography, class relations, culture and much more to create a true 'politics of the possible'.

This collection of essays covers a broad range of disciplines to produce a work that rethinks relationships and divisions in gender, geography, class relations, culture and much more to create a true 'politics of the possible'.

This collection of essays covers a broad range of disciplines to produce a work that rethinks relationships and divisions in gender, geography, class relations, culture, and much more to create a true 'politics of the possible.' Broadly emphasizing forms, ideologies, and class relations, Sangari's essays crisscross and cohere around several themes: the politics of social location and the connection between local, metropolitan and colonial geographies as they bear on debates about the nature of knowledge; the transnational and regional production of ideologies such as altruism under the aegis of colonialism; ways of theorizing women's labor, literacy, and consent to patriarchal arrangements and dominant ideologies. Sangari's analysis of Indian English and the relationships between 'literature' and the nonliterary change, the way we consider the divisions between the metropolitan and the subcontinental. In her discussion of capitalism and colonialism, her egalitarian feminist viewpoint opens up and questions issues of cultural autonomy and hybridity. She also critiques the impact of race, caste, class, religion, and misogyny on patriarchal ideology and its effect on women. The 'politics of the possible' mapped by these essays presents itself in several areas: as a more sensitive feminist historiography; as the social potential for secular activity in seemingly impossible situations; in the historical possibilities that were offered by situations not doomed to inevitable outcomes; and as the elements of resistance produced by the contradictions of different structures of oppression.

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.