Book Review, 19 May 2025

Gender In Modern India: History, Culture, Marginality, edited by Lata Singh & Shashank Shekhar Sinha (Oxford University Press, February 2024, 364 Pages, priced at $108).

This volume edited by Lata Singh and Shasank Shekhar Sinha re-explores gender realities in India in the contemporary times. What interested me most is how the volume has been structured and how the editors have been very particular in tracing the continuity of research in Gender Studies taking up the themes of gender in three volumes in particular, such as: Recasting Women: Essays in Colonial History (Edited by Kumkum Sangari & Sudesh Vaid 1989); Gendering Colonial India: Reforms, Print, Caste and Communalism (Edited by Charu Gupta 2012);  Handbook of Gender (Edited by Raka Roy 2012). The volume is dedicated to the memory of the social historian, Professor Biswamoy Pati. This volume focusing on gender as its main theme, builds on Pati’s research in certain distinct ways: it dwells on the themes of subordination, marginality, culture, agency, resistance and their intersections. The volume further explores new dimensions and layers where boundaries overlap or intersect in a wider geo-cultural canvas.

The Introduction to the volume very succinctly summarizes the three phases of the nation’s engagement with the issues of gender. The first phase from late 1940s to 1977, has been the decade of women’s movements and scholarships on gender. The phase post 1977 saw the emergence of many women’s organizations, increasing interest in research on Gender Studies and Activism. The New Economic Policy in 1991, paved way for liberalization, globalization, and privatization of the Indian economy. NEP (New Economic Policy) intersected with the subtexts of gender and thus there has been an attempt to redefine gender in terms of class, caste, religion and identity politics. The policy also led to the re-thinking of the concepts such as nation, secularism, socialism, state welfare, sexuality etc. What finally evolved through these movements, scholarship and this rethinking on gender is the understanding that Gender Studies is not only about the question of woman as the second sex. Rather it is a heterogenous concept. With its underlying intersectionalities and interdisciplinariness, Gender Studies contests for what is considered as marginalized. So inevitably the question of history becomes imperative for understanding the contemporary times. The editors mention that their volume does not follow a chronological framework, rather the essays foreground the key themes of contemporary research on gender. The essays in each of the seven segments of the volume are contextualized with their socio-historical backgrounds and available existing literature in the Introduction.

The first section focusing on the theme of ‘Reforms, Caste and Gender’ contains two essays by Uma Chakravarti and Smita M. Patel. Chakravarti’s essay would prompt a researcher to go back to her earlier essay: “Whatever happened to the Vedic Dasi?” in Recasting Women to see how her ideas have further developed and taken on new notes, for further exploration of the theme. Smita M. Patel’s essay discusses how Jotiba Phule and Savitribai Phule in Maharashtra questioned the cultural hegemony of the Brahmanical patriarchy. The Brahmanical treatment of Brahmin women and other castes were criticized by the contemporary reformers resulting in new social reforms which advocated for widow remarriage, women’s health, sexuality, etc. The essay points out how there was a paradigm shift from religious reforms of the colonial period by Brahmo Samaj, Arya Samaj, and Prathana Samaj to the social reforms pertaining to the condition of women and lower castes. The essay also includes Shahu Maharaj and Ambedkar’s contributions to better the conditions of lower caste women and depressed classes.

The second section focusing on the theme of ‘Tribes, Patriarchy and Colonialism’, is particularly interesting. The section contains two essays: one is on the Mizo warrior women in the colonial period and the other on witch-hunting in early Colonial Chotanagpur and Santhal Paraganas or the present-day Jharkhand. Sajal Nag and R. Lalsangpuii’s essay on Mizo women chieftains of Lushai tribe, and their resistance to the colonial British masters, using different diplomatic tactics is evidently a new area of research. Doubly marginalized, though they were as tribal and women, in this way they reversed the gender roles by proving themselves superior to their colonial masters. Shashank Shekhar Sinha’s essay on witch-hunting is about the gendered tribal women in Chotanagpur and Santhal Paraganas, who were marked as witches and tortured and killed by the patriarchal and patrilinear tribal societies. The essay unravels how the tribal society marks a woman as a witch in the first place.  Though the idea of witch-hunting might be attributed to the myths of ‘Baranda Bonga’ and ‘Asur Kahani’, among the tribal people, these became an excuse for gendering women. The British had banned witch-hunting.  Yet the tribal patriarchy could not be controlled, and it was an anti-colonial stance taken by them against the British as a reaction to this ban. The reasons for singling out a woman as a witch often had socio-economic issues, related to women’s property rights, ailments in a village household, etc. The essay undertakes a brief historical overview of witch-hunting in the region and tells us that Santhal Hul (1856-57) and 1857 uprisings as anti-colonial movements saw a massive surge in the killing of the “witches”. Though the British administration had attempted to curtail the practice, it was not successful in eradicating it. As Shashank Shekhar Sinha concludes, “the socio-economic strains generated by colonialism created new forms of exclusion and marginalization for women” and prompted the tribal patriarchy to carve out new meanings and forms of witch-hunting.

'Gender and Labour' in post-independence India forms the third segment of the book, which includes two essays by M. V. Shobhana Warrier and Indu Agnihotri. The essays address the invisibility of women in trade unions and their other work experiences. Shobhana Warrier writes about the experience of the women workers in the cotton textile industry in Madurai in 1920s, and Agnihotri’s essay is about the agricultural worker women’s lives in Colonial Punjab in the period of Great Depression between the two World Wars. Warrier writes how the curtailment of marriage feasts and offering jewellery to the bride as a customary practice which comprised “Stridhan”, was promoted by the Akalis. While this was a strategy adopted to cope with the Depression, it dealt a severe blow to the women in the rural areas, increasing their work burden and undermining their right and access to even the limited economic security which their possession of bridal jewellery offered to them.

      Essays on 'Masculinity and Sexuality' by Charu Gupta and Prem Chowdhry offer an incisive analysis of sexuality in India through a social analysis and through a cinematic representation, respectively. The essays see masculinity and sexuality as intersecting and overlapping concerns in the 1980s and the 1990s India and point to the fact that these are not grounded in the biological contexts but are guided by different power relations and hierarchies. Meanings are variables constructed through a range of intersections of gender with race, caste, class, ethnicity and religious communities. There are references to Ashis Nandy’s The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism (Oxford University Press 1983), Mrinalini Sinha’s Colonial Masculinity (Manchester University Press 1995) and Sikata Banerjee’s Make me a Man! Masculinity, Hinduism and Nationalism in India (State University of New York 2005). The essay by Gupta also discusses the upper-class anxiety for deviant sexualities.

The Fifth Segment includes two essays on women and health in India by Ranjana Saha and Rama V. Baru. The first one takes up the issue of medical facilities available to women and write about childbirth and nursing in colonial Bengal. The second essay is about the role of women missionaries in building medical institutions in colonial India.

The next segment on 'Cultural Identity' is particularly interesting. There are two essays in this section.  Lata Singh writes about the Muslim courtesans in colonial India and Dev Nath Pathak about the Maithili Folk community in Bihar. The essay by Pathak, evidently is a very intriguing research and offers a fresh dimension to Culture Studies.  Pathak points out the intersectionality of caste, class and gender in the worship of Ma Ugratara in a village named Mahishi in the district of Saharsa in the northeastern part of Bihar. The essay as it weaves the narratives of the deity’s origin in the eighth or ninth century AD, also informs us that the sacred region has much to offer as an archaeological site as well. Many statues belonging to the time of the Palas have been unearthed during the tilling of the surrounding areas for agricultural purposes. He tells us how the Ugratara Mahotsav as a cultural festival which has the pan-India attraction flattens the heterogenic contours of the deity’s worship and origin. The essay on the one hand is resourceful for cultural historians and on the other it also writes about the engendering of the intersectionality of the worship when it is foregrounded as a part of the mainstream cultural dialectics.

The last section of this volume is on 'Migrations and their New Dynamics'. The section includes two essays. The essay by Rajni Palriwala, studies two types of internal migration. The long-term migration is associated with marriages and seasonal migration and the other associated with transferrable employees. Indrani Mazumdar in her essay, “Mapping Marginal Terrains … .”, writes about women’s labour migrations from Odisha.

In sum, the book focusses on the concepts of marginality from the colonial times to the postcolonial India, focusing on women, depressed classes, labour dynamics, folk cultures and so on. It continues with the argument foregrounded by volumes like Recasting Women and the other two volumes mentioned by the editors in their Introduction. While I would congratulate the editors for such a commendable volume on Gender Studies, I have a few observations. When we consider contemporary India, we must also look at the changing concepts of marginality. Even the use of the umbrella term – “Adivasi” is not applicable to the northeast. The scheduled tribes in the northeast are a migrant race of people across the hills whose origin cannot be fixed. Their status as scheduled tribes cannot be equated with those in Chhattisgarh and other places in India. Nor is northeast a homogenous terrain of cultures. Each one of the states has its own identity, which again has polyphonic cultures and origins. Also, when we turn to modernization in India and the country's rise in global economy, we must consider the technological India. Harish Trivedi’s remark about “cyber coolies” (Trivedi’s rejoinder to Susan Sontag’s lecture titled “The World as India”, published in TLS, June 13, 2003) held good two decades back. Though the Indian brain drain continues, there is a positive shift towards self-reliability. There is a potential for developing this sector with Indian infrastructure. What thwarts progress in this sector and higher education is the Reservation dynamics in IITs and premier institutions in science, technology and medicine for admissions and job recruitment. Reservation Policy was important when it was implemented. But presently, the policy has largely engendered the Indian education system and research organizations. One of the main reasons for brain drain is the reservation policy and party politics in job recruitment and implementation of any project. Thus, time has come for the intellectuals to reconsider the concepts of marginality as a variable concept, where “depressed classes” can be associated with economic conditions and not with the caste factor. We have continued with the anti-Brahmanical stance for a very long time. It is time to remove the biases of caste, class and gender when it comes to intellect and higher education. For higher education to be linked with the changing technology, upgradation of syllabi and of teachers are also necessary. We are as a nation yet gendered by the wraps of fixed concepts. Even when we talk about intersectionality and interdisciplinariness, it is yet a linear thinking that prevails when it comes to the concepts of marginality.

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Jayita Sengupta,

Professor of English,

Cooch Behar Panchanan

Barma University,

 Chief Editor, Caesurae.