Breaking Out of Invisibility : Women in Indian History

Contents: Preface. 1. Introduction/Aparna Basu and Anup Taneja. 2. Investigating gendered religious traditions--a review/Kumkum Roy. 3. Gender and sexuality in ancient Punjab: a case study of the Karna Parva in the Mahabharata./Shalini Shah. 4. Kalhana's Rajatarangini: a gender perspective/Devika Rangachari. 5. A woman for all seasons: Anandibai Karve's life (1866-1950) as a Palimpsestic social narrative/Meera Kosambi. 6. The mirror of an age: the debate on widow remarriage in Indian fiction (1857-1930)/Rajul Sogani. 7. 'Brahmanizing' state, 'Sanskritizing' castes, and dowry in colonial India/Ranjana Sheel. 8. Gender, nationalism and Khadi: rendering women as domestic (ated) and not political subjects/Lata Singh. 9. Transition: gender politics and literature in Tamil Nadu/Vijaya Ramaswamy. 10. A return to the 'Purity' of Islam: Muslim women and social reform in India, c. 1914-38/Karin Deutsch Karlekar. 11. Tribal women: resurrection, demystification, and gender struggle/K.S. Singh. 12. Fashioning minds and images: a case study of Stree Darpan (1909-1928)/Kamlesh Mohan. 13. From "Perpetual Tutelage" to personal initiative: crime fiction and the emergence of the self-governing woman in colonial Bengal/Nupur Chaudhuri.14. Female eleemosynary space in the 'Golden' Goan cityscape: a case study of the Recolhimentos/Pratima Kamal. Select annotated bibliography. Contributors.

"Since the mid-1970s gender has been introduced as a fundamental category of social, cultural and historical reality, perception and study. In the recent past there has been a growing interest on the question of gender within historical research. Social history is becoming more intelligible through recent studies on women. Women are no longer invisible in history.

In India also gender history is developing into a new area of research and today we have scholars with a much more sophisticated approach than even a decade ago. This monograph marks a welcome recognition of the importance of situating women's history within the broader perspective of social history, and illustrates the wide variety of themes in women's history on which historians have been working over the last few decades. The essays in this monograph have been written with great insight and bear ample evidence of painstaking research. Though basically intended as a reference work for scholars who wish to conduct an indepth study on the aspects covered, yet lay readers too will find some of the essays interesting." (jacket)