Gendering Colonial India: Reforms, Print, Caste and Communalism

This definitive collection of essays analyses the close interaction between gender, caste and community identities in colonial India between the early nineteenth and the first half of twentieth centuries. This volume brings out various regional complexities and lively public debates on social reforms for women and their impact on issues like sati, widow remarriage, domesticity, sexuality and education. The debates found multifaceted expression in an emerging dynamic popular-public sphere and also in a flourishing vernacular print culture. The three primary texts translated by J. Devika, Anshu Malhotra and Charu Gupta bring out the relationship, most often fraught, between popular literature, reforms and women. It has essays by both established and emerging feminist historians.