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My Reminiscences Social Development during the Gandhian Era and After

Renuka Ray

In writing about her life and work, Renuka Ray also relates the momentous history of India, from her birth in 1904 to her death in 1997, encompassing the years of the growth and consolidation of the nationalist movement, to partition and independence, and the equally compelling post-independence period. As a participant member of the ruling elite, a close associate of Gandhiji, Rabindranath Tagore, Jawaharlal Nehru, Bidhan Chandra Roy, Durgabai Deshmukh and Indira Gandhi, she provides an insider's view to the historical events she witnessed.

Born into a family of leading Brahmos, Renuka Ray was keenly involved in social reform. As a young girl of sixteen, she met Gandhiji at the special session of the Indian National Congress in Calcutta in September 1920, and as she said, 'it changed my life'. She was to remain a lifelong Gandhian, committed to his ideals, though, as the book reveals, not an uncritical follower.

Nominated to the Central Assembly as a representative of the AIWC to discuss possible legal changes in the laws pertaining to women, Renuka Ray was an independent member; the only other woman being Radhabai Subbarayan, who represented the Congress. In many ways, Sir B. N. Rau's Hindu Women's Rights of Succession Bill was the first campaign for a uniform social code, and Renuka Ray fought hard for it. Ray also took a radical stand on the Zamindari Abolition Bill when she was in the Constituent Assembly.

One of the most interesting parts of the memoir is the author's discussion of the partition in the eastern region from the vantage point of being minister for Rehabilitation and Relief, West Bengal, 1952-1957, and she analyses Central government policy towards the Bengali refugee, summed up as 'niggardly' and hostile, who received one-third of what was spent in rehabilitation of the Punjabi refugees. No longer an active politician after 1964, she concentrated on social work and worked closely on women's issues.

Never negative or pessimistic, she says that the human spirit strains after what is unattainable, which fills her with hope. It is indeed this human spirit that infused her life and provides a critical document of her times.

Demy octavo, hardbound 285pp ISBN 81-85604-78-9 Jan 2005 Rs 350

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Restless Mothers and Turbulent Daughters:
Situating Tribes in Gender Studies

Shashank Shekhar Sinha


 

How is gender ideology reproduced in adivasi societies? How far can gender constructions be instrumental in perpetuating women's subjugation and exploitation? Focusing upon Chotanagpur, now a part of the newly formed state of Jharkhand, Shashank Shekhar Sinha tries to raise questions that are of paramount concern yet are so peripheral in the existing studies on tribes and gender.

Investigating traditions, an area largely ignored by historians and social scientists, Sinha tries to show how these can influence and structure the construction and reproduction of gender identities. It is true that women were hardly positioned as equals in adivasi societies or, indeed in mainstream Indian society, but they played an important role in the traditional division of labour. Women were the cultivators, they sold produce in the markets, and they sold their labour. Later they were to play a significant role in the adivasi uprisings against colonial exploitation. Under the impact of colonialism and market capitalism, they were pushed to the margins of resulting political economics. In addition, the infiltration of caste and religious influences brought about significant shifts in traditional gender identities. Women faced three systems of discrimination: patriarchy, colonialism and capitalism, all reinforcing, and on occasions, working in tandem with each other. This book discusses how women negotiated with these complex systems, sometimes visibly, sometimes invisibly.

Shashank Shekhar Sinha is Senior Acquisitions Editor with Oxford University Press, New Delhi. He has written articles on gender, tribes and identity formations and has taught history at the PGDAV and Deshbandhu College, University of Delhi. His current research interests include social and environmental history and social history of witchcraft.

Nonfiction demy octavo, hardbound 290pp ISBN 81-85604-73-8 July 2005 Rs 550

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Her-Self: Gender and Early Writings by Malayalee Women 1898-1938

Translated from the Malayalam and edited by J. Devika

In Kerala, women participated in the vigorous debate over modern gender relations, which were taking shape in this period. All these pieces appeared in various women's magazines and newspapers in Kerala, and it is unfortunate that they have been omitted from the dominant narratives on social reform in Malayalee society. Although each article has its individual viewpoint, taken together they may be read as efforts to define 'women's perspectives' as specifically oppositional standpoints. Not surprisingly, many are rejoinders or responses to public figures who claimed to speak on behalf of a 'general good'. In these texts Malayalee women insisted on the necessity of conceiving the agency of women in modern society as an active one even in the domestic domain. They argued that with modern society largely seeking to ground itself on non-coercive means of achieving and maintaining social cohesion, the qualities identified as 'Womanly' within the discourse of modern gender difference acquired significance not in the home alone, but also in the world outside.

The 1920s and 1930s saw a blurring of the public and the domestic domains. Woman by her very nature was seen as especially suitable for employment in schools, hospitals, in social work, the range of institutions increasing progressively. This was also the time of the foundation and growth of the All India Women's Conference and of local organizations like the Travancore Muslim Women's Association, the Kottayam Mahila Samajam in Malabar, and the Sree Narayana Sevika Samajam, and women were also nominated members of the Shree Mulam Popular Assembly of the state of Travancore. Conveying the richness and variety of writings on gender, the pieces also present a critique of modernity.

J. Devika is research associate, Centre for Development Studies, Thiruvananthapuram.

Demy octavo, hardbound approx 220pp ISBN 81-85604-74-6 Nov 2004 Rs 450

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In the Path of Service:Memories of a Changing Century

Ashoka Gupta
Translated from the Bengali by Sipra Bhattacharya with Ranjana Dasgupta

In writing about her life and times, Ashoka Gupta characteristically stresses on what she witnessed rather than on herself. These were decades, as she says, 'of new beginnings and new learning . . . amidst a constantly expanding stream of relationships that made up my personal life. These were also nine decades of turbulent change in the life of a nation-in-the making eager to find its place in the sun.' Thus she knits her personal and public life together, relating how her life as a private individual became inexorably linked to voluntary social work.

Ashoka Gupta lost her father when she was six, and spent her childhood in Jaipur, Delhi and Calcutta, and the constant shifting of her home made her adept at changing situations. As a child of the distinguished writer, Jyotirmoyee Devi, she was drawn to books and learning, and even as a small child she learnt the importance of family ties and responsibilities, which later played such a large role in her marital life.

Born in 1912, she belonged to the generation of middle class girls who went to school and later to university, and dreamt of building a modern progressive nation. Marriage to Shaibal Kumar Gupta, ICS, a district judge who was a nationalist and a Gandhian, took her to the districts of Bengal, and this is when she began her involvement with social work. In Dhaka in 1936, she became a member of the All India Women's Conference, which was to become a lifelong commitment, becoming its President in 1986 and its Patron at present. In Bankura in 1943, she helped coordinate relief during the man-made, cataclysmic Bengal Famine. Later in 1946, she plunged into relief work after the Noakhali communal carnage in 1946, at Gandhiji's behest, living and working among the stricken villagers, taking along her very young daughter, Kasturi, to underline her commitment. Her account of the grief and trauma of Partition leaves a rare record of the broken lives and resettlement of millions who made the trek to the new India. She also provides a clear-sighted critique of the Indian government's inadequate and ill-implemented policy towards the eastern refugees.

One of the most interesting parts of the memoir is the post-independence period when she was appointed to many responsible positions: member of the Central Social Welfare Board, assigned to Orissa, Tripura and Rajasthan, a member of the advisory committee of the Bengal Board, on the Board of the LIC, of the Karma Samiti of Viswa Bharati, and of her time with the Kasturba Trust. She tells us of the many women pioneers she met through her work, ending the book with her forthright reflections on the status of women and the nature of social work today.

The former president of the All India Women's Conference (AIWC), a premier organization for women, Ashoka Gupta has spent over fifty years in social work.

Sipra Bhattacharya has always been involved in teaching history at college and at school levels, and is an experienced translator.

Ranjana Dasgupta is a research assistant at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences Calcutta (CSSSC).

Demy octavo, hardbound approx 220pp ISBN 81-85604-74-6 Nov 2004 Rs 450

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Literature/Sociology/Politics/History

Talking of Power: Early Writings of Bengali Women

Edited by Malini Bhattacharya and Abhijit Sen

These writings, translated for the first time from the Bengali, are by women who were amongst the earliest to receive a 'modern' education and become members of a reading and writing public. Women wrote on a wide variety of concerns, in many journals that had come into being because of the tremendous growth of vernacular print culture. These were often edited by women, including some of the writers in the anthology: Bharat Mahila, Bharati o Balak, Antahpur, Mahila, and Bharati, to mention just a few. The writers' contributions helped build the image of the new educated woman, self-confident, opinionated, transgressive.

Who were these writers? They came, as expected from elite backgrounds, most were from families that belonged to the Brahmo Samaj such as Bamasundari Devi, Saratkumari Chaudhurani, Hemantakumari Chaudhuri, Kumudini Mitra, Kamini Roy, and Swarnakumari Devi and her two daughters, Hiranmoyee Devi and Sarala Devi, members of the family of Debendranath Tagore of Jorasanko. Some were Hindus, like Kailashbasini Devi, Girindramohini Dasi, Krishnabhabini Das and Anindita Devi. Two Muslim writers of this period have also been included, the remarkably erudite and pioneering Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain and the lesser known Khairunnissa Khatun, a social reformer in her own right. No information could be found on Jagadishwari Devi or Kusumkumari Devi, the former debunked the notion that tradition demanded the Hindu woman abjure wearing shoes, and that if they did, they were westernized, and the latter argued for consensual marriage, well ahead of her time.

The articles cover a whole range of social issues from women's social powerlessness, which gets intertwined with the powerlessness of the colonized, to the need to participate in the growing nationalist protest against the first Partition of Bengal, 1905, and the ensuing Swadeshi movement. The early writings speak of the home as the proper domain for women, where women should strive for good domestic management. The later pieces, written when the fight for education is no longer an issue, persuade women to enter the public domain. Thus there is much interest in what would be a suitable dress to wear outside, how to help women gain some financial independence, how to rouse their patriotism, the wish to earn a living, and so on. Most interesting, perhaps, is the manner in which perceptions of patriarchy change. As these writers make their way into the elite literary world and elite politics, perhaps they also discover a new role for themselves in the construction of the nation.

Malini Bhattacharya was formerly Director, School of Women's Studies, Jadavpur University, and at present chairperson of the West Bengal Commission for Women.
Abhijit Sen is Publications Officer, School of Women's Studies, Jadavpur University.

Nonfiction Demy Octavo Hard Bound 180pp ISBN 81-85604-66-5 Oct 2003 Rs450.00

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Tense Past, Tense Present: Women Writing in English

Edited by Joel Kuortti

'Literature represents that dangerous area where it is impossible not
to go too far.' - Shama Futehally.

'When you are trying to find a way out of the silence, you need words. I have this feeling when reading Indian women writers that they are--as Rushdie puts it--"reshaping English". . . so that women could talk about what's never said.' With these words, Kuortti begins his interview with Shashi Desphande, trying to draw a picture of why women write and why they write in English. Writing in English cannot be neutral. As a colony, the language was inescapably associated with class, race and power; after independence it has grown in power and status yet the problematic of it being the language of the hegemonic West remains. Even so a new canon of women writing in English is being formed. Interviewing seven women writers, Shashi Deshpande, Shama Futehally, Githa Hariharan, Lakshmi Kannan, Sujatha Mathai, Anuradha Marwah-Roy and Mina Singh, Kuortti also presents extracts from their writings. He elicits intriguing responses on why they choose to write in English, their difference from Indians writing from abroad and of their views on women writing in the regional languages. Aware of the changing status of English and of women writers within India, Kuortti ably analyses this new cultural phenomenon.

Joel Kuortti is Adjunct Professor, Dept of English, University of Jyväskyla, and researcher at Unviersity of Joensuu, Finland.

Nonfiction demy octavo, paperback 130pp ISBN 81-85604-58-4 Feb 2003 Rs 450

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The Packaging of Freedom: Feminism and Popular Culture

Ipshita Chanda

The author suggests provocatively that it is in popular culture that the discourses of modernity, feminism and progress, all articulated by the women's movement, become lived realities. Looking at popular women's journals like Sananda, Femina, Cosmopolitan and Meri Saheli, among others, advertisements, TV serials and media icons, she wonders whether popular culture could be used to disseminate the goals of feminism. Or is it a case of new accommodations being formed in the name of women’s liberation? What are the implications for feminism?

Ipshita Chanda is Reader, Department of Comparative Literature, Jadavpur University.

Nonfiction demy octavo hardbound 221pp ISBN 81-85604-60-6 Feb 2003 Rs 450

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In Sickness and in Health: The Family Experience of HIV/AIDS in India

Premilla D'Cruz

These words from Vinita, who has been diagnosed as HIV-negative, and is looking after her HIV-positive husband, give a glimpse of the profound physical and emotional burdens that a wife experiences in her role, prescribed by society, as the prime caregiver. Moreover, the stress of caregiving is compounded by the stigmatizing nature of the infection, which often stops infected individuals and their families from looking for support. The result is loneliness and isolation, creating a conspiracy of silence that is characteristic of AIDS. Gender biases ensure that a woman, who has also been diagnosed with AIDS, and who continues to take care of her husband, cannot expect to receive care in the same measure. Indeed, she still carries the burden of the family’s survival. A pioneering book that handles the data without ever losing sight of the human dimensions.

Premilla D’Cruz is Assistant Professor, Organizational Behaviour, Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad. Her research interests include gender, health studies, qualitative research methods and family psychology.

Nonfiction demy octavo paperback 124pp ISBN 81-85604-59-2 Feb 2003 Rs 185

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De-Eroticizing Assault: Essays on Modesty, Honour and Power

Kalpana Kannabiran and Vasanth Kannabiran

Kalpana Kannabiran and Vasanth Kannabiran present fresh insights on linkages among gender, culture and politics. Their 'concerns in politics have centred on questions of culture and representation, on power and hegemonies that find legitimacy, in globalization, and the imperatives of anti-communal struggles in a field fractured by the globalizing politics of cultures'. The authors give a valuable first hand account of radical Left activism with an incisive critique and discuss why radical feminists quit radical Left parties. They reveal the connections among caste, gender and violence. Other essays discuss sexuality, rape and domestic violence, and show role of 'sexual terrorism' that is used to silence and subjugate women. They go on to analyse ideologies of gender, power and sexual violence in the courtroom. They point to the difficulties that even educated and articulate women face in acknowledging and then confronting sexual harassment.

Kalpana writes on the different diasporic experience of indentureship in Trinidad. Together they discuss the anti-arrack struggle of Andhra Pradesh and the Telugam Desam Party and assert why eunuchs must be given their legitimate political space. Finally, they argue convincingly on behalf of the Reservation Bill where a third of the seats would be reserved for women.

Kalpana Kannabiran and Vasanth Kannabiran are founder members of Asmita Resource Centre for Women, Hyderabad. Kalpana Kannabiran is a sociologist and a senior Associate Professor at the National Academy of Legal Studies and Research, University of Law, Hyderabad. Vasanth Kannabiran is a poet and a teacher of English literature for over two decades and has also worked on Gender and Development.

Nonfiction Demy Octavo Hardbound 276pp ISBN 81-85604-52-5 Feb 2002 Rs 500

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In Search of Freedom: An Unfinished Journey

Manikuntala Sen

Foreword by Tapan Raychaudhuri
Translated from the Bengali by Stree

From a review:

'Her personal struggle is representative of the lives of those hundreds of
women who came out of closed doors to be part of active politics.'

– The Statesman

In the 1930s, a young woman broke free of family and social bonds to reach out for a cause. As Manikuntala Sen says, 'The dream of socialism was in the air and the young shared it.' Beginning her political journey as a young college student, she soon became a full-time member of the Communist Party, involved in clandestine activities, mobilizing women throughout Bengal, helping them to articulate their needs, learn marketable skills and take part in the freedom movement against British rule. After independence in 1947, she fought three elections and rose to become the deputy leader of the Opposition in the West Bengal Assembly with Jyoti Basu as the leader. She recounts the changes within the Party, many of which she disagreed with. She writes of the terrible man-made famine under the British in 1943, of the sharecroppers revolt––the Tebhaga movement––of those whom the trauma of Partition turned into working women who became the main financial support for their families. Manikuntala writes of the joy of living and working for an ideal, of the many committed fellow Communists she knew, and of her painful, self-imposed exile when the Communist Party split and she could not accept either faction.

A lifelong nonconformist, Manikuntala Sen was born around 1911 (she was uncertain of the exact date). One of the prominent women leaders of the Communists, she was deputy Leader of the Opposition, 1951-1957, West Bengal Legislative Assembly. She died in 1987, without ever returning to politics.

Nonfiction Demy Octavo Hardbound 326pp black and white photographs ISBN 81-85604-26-6 January 2001 Rs 450

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The Silken Swing: The Cultural Universe of Dalit Women

Fernando Franco, Jyotsna Macwan and Suguna Ramanathan 


From a review:

'The Silken Swing represents the findings of serious research . . . brings to
the reader the views of the women themselves.' -Biblio

Offering a rare view from the bottom of the caste pyramid, this book shows how Dalit women perceive themselves and the world around them. Selecting two villages in two talukas of Gujarat, the book focuses on Vankar, Bhangi and Koli-Patel women, revealing how the caste and gender structures that govern their lives also provide tools of resistance: of negotiation rather than of confrontation. The book draws the reader into an intimate world, aiming to 'let the women's voices be heard, speaking of their understandings and their interactions'.

The first part looks at the women's day-to-day lives. The second relates songs and stories that explore ways in which cultural artefacts function as normative prescriptions and expressive outlets. Themes emerge relating to family relationships, sexuality, life-sustaining responsibilities and the presence of the Mother Goddesses. Of particular interest is the exploration of work, indicating that women, however overburdened, appropriate it to recover self-esteem and assert identity. This is a path-breaking book that reveals the vibrant world of these women.

About the editors Fernando Franco, S.J., is with the International Social Secretariat of the Society of Jesus; He was earlier Director of Research, Indian Social Institute, New Delhi; Jyotsna Macwan is Manager, Resource and Support Team, Behavioural Science Centre, Ahmedabad; Suguna Ramanathan retired as Dean, Arts Faculty, St. Xavier's College, Ahmedabad

Nonfiction Demy Octavo Hardbound 343pp ISBN 81-85604-41-X Jan 2000 Rs 450

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