Patriarchy

Patriarchy

V. Geetha

Series Editor Maithreyi Krishnaraj

demy octavo pb ISBN 81 85604 46 0 Feb 2007 rpt 2009 Rs 250

This book deals with the nature, origin, hermeneutics and sociology of patriarchy. Reviewing the sources available, it discusses the historical contexts which have nurtured patriarchal societies. Finally it applies these ideas to Indian history and sociology and examines how caste has interacted synergistically with patriarchy in India. A useful text for students as well as for the general reader.
‘Today, the term 'patriarchy' is used somewhat differently. It is not only a descriptive term that explains how specific societies construct male authority and power, but also an analytical category. The transformation of patriarchy from a descriptive to an analytical category happened in a specific global historical context, the 1970s, that gave birth to a rousing feminist intellectual culture.’

V.Geetha is an independent scholar who writes in both Tamil and in English.Among her books are Gender (this series) and with S.V.Rajadurai, Towards a Non-Brahmin Millenium:From Iyothee Thass to Periyar (Samya 1998).She is editorial director, Tara Publishing, Chennai.Maithreyi Krishnaraj is a pioneering scholar in gender studies and was formerly professor and director, Research Centre for Women's Studies, SNDT Women's University, Mumbai.

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Gendering Caste: Through a Feminist Lens

Gendering Caste: Through a Feminist Lens

Uma Chakravarti

Series Editor Maithreyi Krishnaraj

demy octavo pb Sept 2003 rpt 2006 ISBN 81 85604 54 1 Rs 250

Examining the crucial linkages between caste and gender, undertaken, perhaps for the first time, Uma Chakravarti unmasks the mystique of consensus in the workings of the caste system to reveal the underlying violence and coercion that perpetuate a severely hierarchical and unequal society. The subordination of women and the control of female sexuality are crucial to the maintenance of the caste system, creating what feminist scholars have termed ‘brahmanical patriarchy’. She discusses the range of patriarchal practices within the larger framework of sexuality, labour and access to material resources, and also focuses on the centrality of endogamous marriages that maintain the system. Erudite yet accessible, this book enables the reader to understand the interface of gender and caste and to participate in its critical analysis.

A distinguished feminst historian, Uma Chakravarti taught history at Miranda House from 1996-98.She has long been associated with the woman's movement and the democratic rights movement. Maithreyi Krishnaraj is a pioneering scholar in gender studies and was formerly professor and director, Research Centre for Women's Studies, SNDT Women's University, Mumbai. 

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Gender

Gender

V.Geetha

Series Editor Maithreyi Krishnaraj

demy octavo pb Feb 2002 ISBN-81 85604 45 2 Rs 250 rpt May 2012

In her incisive discussion, V. Geetha points out that 'gender is everywhere', and when we allocate to the male and female sexes, specific and distinctive attributes and roles, we are 'doing' gender. She suggests insightfully that gender 'is both part of the world we live in as well as a way of understanding that world'.
Provocative and jargon-free, the book shows how gender identities mesh with those constituted by caste, class, religion and sexual preferences, forming a set of arrangements that have evolved through history. It enables the reader to undertake a fresh and critical look of what we consider to be normal and given, to ask questions, to take stock of the self and the world.

V.Geetha is an independent scholar who writes in both Tamil and in English.She has co-authored with S.V.Rajadurai, Towards a Non-Brahmin Millenium:From Iyothee Thass to Periyar (Samya 1998).She is editorial director, Tara Publishing, Chennai.Maithreyi Krishnaraj is a pioneering scholar in gender studies and was formerly professor and director, Research Centre for Women's Studies, SNDT Women's University, Mumbai. 

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My Life as a Psychiatrist: Memoirs and Essays

My Life as a Psychiatrist: Memoirs and Essays    

Ajita Chakraborty     

Foreword by Ashis Nandy

demy octavo hb 220pp ISBN 81-85604-92-4 Rs 550 Published Feb 2010

At the age of 12 or 13, Ajita Chakraborty read Moner Khela (The Mind’s Games) by Bijoylal Chattopadhyay, who interpreted the characters of many fictional characters through psychoanalysis, resulting in a lifelong fascination and commitment to psychiatry. As one of the first woman psychiatrists in India, now in her eighties, Chakraborty looks back at her life and  work, talking frankly about herself, her unconventional family and the 'confusions' of her childhood that propelled her to becoming a psychiatrist.

Qualified as a doctor, she sailed to England in 1952, to further her medical education, taking courses in psychiatry and working in British mental hospitals for almost ten years, and also obtaining qualifications such as DPM and MRCP. She returned to India in 1960, where modern psychiatry was still a fledgling, considered as subordinate to other medical specializations. As one of the first woman in the field she faced considerable hostility and opposition, and saw her dreams of setting up an advanced department of psychiatry and elevating its then lowly status, fail. Indeed the book throws considerable light on the sociology on medicine and discusses why Chakraborty and her friends who had returned with medical qualifications gained abroad were thwarted in their attempts to set up a modern health system. Of considerable interest is Chakraborty's discussion on why psychiatry taught in the West cannot be applied directly in other cultures, emphasizing the need and significance of transcultural psychology in postcolonial societies.

The second part of the book offers a selection from her essays, published in various distinguished journals, which are indeed an essential part of the book as they illustrate in 'theoretical and concrete terms what is dealt with anecdotally and personally in the memoirs'.

                                  

Born in 1926, Ajita Chakraborty specialized in psychiatry, retiring as professor of the Department of Neurology and later director of the Institute of Post Graduate Medical Education and Research (IPGMER), Calcutta. She was president of the Indian Psychiatric Society and is fellow, Royal College of Psychiatrists, Edinburgh and London.

Ashis Nandy, one of India’s most distinguished scholars, is a Fellow of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi.

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Legally Dispossessed: Gender, Identity and the Process of Law

Legally Dispossessed: Gender, Identity and the Process of Law

Maitrayee Mukhopadhyay

demy octavo hb 246pp  ISBN 81-85604-39-8 Rs 180 Feb 1998

This path-breaking study of women’s experience of litigation under personal laws (those that cover marriage and inheritance) raises vital questions of identity and citizenship in India and throws new light on the uniform civil code debate. The author asks why is it so difficult to disentangle woman ‘as subject/citizen imbued with rights from that of being a daughter, sister, wife, widow and the symbol of a community?’ Why is it that both Hindu and Muslim women are usually unsuccessful in their claims for property despite appealing to different personal laws?

By shifting focus from the text of the law to an ethnography of litigation, the nature of disputes, the attitudes of lawyers, the experiences in court, the logic of judgments, and so on, the analysis brings into play the crucial factors that are obscured in abstract discussions of ‘rights’.

Maitrayee Mukhopadhyay received her Ph.D. from the School of African and Asian Studies at the University of Sussex. She is currently working at the Royal Tropical Institute, Amsterdam.

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Conditions of Visibility: Writings on Photography in Contemporary India

Conditions of Visibility: Writings on Photography in Contemporary India

R. Srivatsan

demy octavo hb 174pp ISBN 81-85604-28-2 Rs 450 Jan 2000

Elaborating new theoretical perspectives on visual hegemony, this book addresses the political processes of the photographic image. How does photography invoke an epistemology that subtly determines the scope and limit of what can be understood, said or done with images? Srivatsan uses gender, caste and class to serve as frames of reference for this very original and stimulating analysis. He takes into consideration a range of visual material: hand painted cinema hoardings, the modernism of Henri Cartier-Bresson, photographs in police records and the visual politics pf advertising and new photography.

                                

R. Srivatsan is senior fellow, Anveshi Research Centre of Women’s Studies, Hyderabad. His research interests are on critical development studies, visual culture, health and healthcare systems.

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Negotiating Intimacies: Sexualities, Birth Control and Poor Households

Negotiating Intimacies: Sexualities, Birth Control and Poor Households

Arna Seal

demy octavo hb 126pp ISBN 81-85604-29-0 Rs 290 Jan 2000

In this book, a hundred women who live in Calcutta's slums talk directly about their sexual and birth control experiences. As the facts and stories accumulate, we get a picture of these women's lives that is frighteningly bare of choice.

The author asks how women's income-earning capacities as well as those of their men, their status in their families and their relations with other kin affect their social and sexual autonomy. Seal goes on to consider whether their interests conform to the ideals of feminist liberation. How far has the movement been able to address their concerns?

Arna Seal is a consultant in marketing and social research. She received her masters and doctoral degrees in sociology from Tulane University, New Orleans.

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Tense Past, Tense Present: Women Writing in English

Tense Past, Tense Present: Women Writing in English

Edited by Joel Kuortti

demy octavo hb 130pp ISBN 81-85604-58-4 Rs 450 Feb 2003

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.

Joel Kuortti is Acting Professor of English at the Department of English, University of Tempere, Finland. Apart from Indian women’s writings in English, he is interested in diasporic Indian literature and postcolonial and feminist literary theory.

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

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

Premilla D’Cruz

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

Wives receive profound physical and emotional burdens as the prime caregivers of spouses who are HIV-positive or suffering from AIDS. The stigmatizing nature of the infection compounds the stress and stops infected individuals and families from looking for support. The result is loneliness and isolation, creating a conspiracy of silence that is characteristic of AIDS. Moreover, gender biases ensure that women who have also been diagnosed with AIDS, and continue to take care of their husbands, cannot expect to receive care in the same measure. At the same time they remain responsible for the survival of the family.

This pioneering book studies the impact on affected families, highlighting changing family dynamics. It also makes recommendations to alleviate the situation.

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

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In the Path of Service: Memories of a Changing Century

In the Path of Service: Memories of a Changing Century

Ashoka Gupta

Translated from the Bengali by Sipra Bhattacharya with Ranjana Dasgupta

demy octavo hb 254pp ISBN 81-85604-56-8 Rs 450 Feb 2005; rpt, April 2008

Born in 1912 and bearing witness to nine remarkable decades, full of change and movement, Ashoka Gupta writes an account of her life and times. These were decades, she says, ‘of new beginnings and new learning. These were also nine decades of turbulent change in the life of a nation-in-in-the-making eager to find its place in the sun’. Thus she knits her personal and public life together. Of particular interest is her narrative of the Bengal Famine of 1943, of Noakhali where she undertook relief work in 1946, under the guidance of Mahatma Gandhi, and her work after independence.

Ashoka Gupta was the former president of the All India Women’s Conference and its patron. She was a member of many social welfare organizations and spent her life in social work.Sipra Bhattacharya teaches history and is a translator; Ranjana Dasgupta works as a research assistant at the Institute of Development Studies, Kolkata. 

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My Reminiscences: Social Development during the Gandhian Era and After

My Reminiscences: Social Development during the Gandhian Era and After

Renuka Ray

demy octavo hb 271pp ISBN 81-85604-78-9 Rs 350 Jan 2005

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 Mahatma Gandhi, Rabindranath Tagore, Jawaharlal Nehru, Bidhan Chandra Ray, Durgabai Deshmukh, a member of the Constituent Assembly, and later of the Lok Sabha and the West Bengal State Assembly, she provides an insider’s view to the historical events she witnessed. Of particular interest is her cogent critique of the Central Government’s policy towards refugee rehabilitation in West Bengal, where she was minister for Rehabilitation and Relief.

Renuka Ray became a Gandhian and a nationalist at sixteen when she met Mahatma Gandhi at the house of her uncle, Chittaranjan Das, in Calcutta. Aside from her political career, she was a well known pioneering social worker, and a former president of the All India Women’s Conference.

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Restless Mothers and Turbulent Daughters: Situating Tribes in Gender Studies

Restless Mothers and Turbulent Daughters: Situating Tribes in Gender Studies

Shashank Shekhar Sinha

demy octavo hb 249pp ISBN 81-85604-73-8 Rs 350 July 2005

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 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. Writing on the Chotanagpur women, using the perspective and tools of gender studies, the author offers a path-breaking study of social change. Of inter-disciplinary interest, this study will appeal to scholars of anthropology, history, sociology, gender and tribal studies.

Shashank Shekhar Sinha is publishing director of Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group, India.. He has written articles on gender, tribes and identity formations and has taught history at the PGDAV and Deshbandhu College, University of Delhi.

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Culture, Power and Agency: Gender in Indian Ethnography

Culture, Power and Agency: Gender in Indian Ethnography

Edited by Lina Fruzzetti and Sirpa Tenhunen

demy octavo hb 231pp ISBN 81-85604-81-9 Rs 280 Jan 2006

Examining the notions and meanings of gender, power and agency, this book bridges theoretical discussion with empirical studies on agency and power. The rich variety of empirical studies on subversive activities have been inadequately theorized and conceptualised. The contributors ask: Does agency empower women? Do cultural, gender-based alternatives, openly or secretly, assist women in search of the freedom to voice themselves? At what costs are women prepared to extend their newly acquired agency? Critically examining the relationship between agency and symbolic structures, the book presents the growing reality confronting Indian women.

Lina Fruzzetti is professor, Department of Anthropology, Brown University. Sirpa Tenhunen is research fellow, Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Helsinki; she  has also written Means of Awakening: Gender, Politics and Practice in Rural India (Stree, 2008).

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Fluid Bonds: Views on Gender and Water

Fluid Bonds: Views on Gender and Water

Edited by Kuntala Lahiri-Dutta

Foreword to the second edition by Joni Seager

Co-published with The National Institute for Environment, Australia

demy octavo hb 464pp March 2006 ISBN 81-85604-70-3 Rs 800 Feb 2006; new ed Feb 2012

How do we recognize the centrality of gender as an organizing principle in the ways water is envisaged, used and managed every day in different locations and contexts? Fluid Bonds puts on a gender lens while looking at water, makes gender visible in the various ways water is dealt with, questions how these ways affect gender and how gender affects views on water.

The book is divided into: I ‘Global Discourses on Gender and Water’, II ‘Gendered Waters in Times and Places’, III ‘Gendered Cultures and Economics of Water’ and IV ‘Representations and Agency of Women in Water’.

Kuntala Lahiri-Dutt is research fellow, Resource Management in Asia Pacific Program, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies at The Australian National University, Canberra. Joni Seager is professor and chair of Global Studies, Bentley University, Boston.

Contributors: Margaret Alston, Tran Tuan Anh, Priyodorshi Banerjee, Rutgerd Boelens, Annie Bolitho, S. Chandrasekhar, Julie Davidson, Marna de Lange, Jane Dowling, Barbara Earth, Deb Foskey, Heather Goodall, Lesley Head, Richard Howitt, Diana James, Kshepo Khumbane, Kuntala Lahiri-Dutt, Fiona Miller, Michelle Moffatt, Ndilekha Mohapi, Pat Muir, Umesh Pandey, Namika Rby, Anil C. Shah, Elaine Stratford, Sandra Suchet-Pearson, Farhana Sultana, Robin Tennant-Wood, Bhavana Upadhyay, Barbara van Koppen, Franz and Keebet von Benda-Beckmann, and Margreet Zwarteveen.

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Gender, Food Security and Rural Livelihoods

Gender, Food Security and Rural Livelihoods

Edited by Maithreyi Krishnaraj

demy octavo hb 380pp ISBN 81-85604-89-4 Rs 600 Dec 2007

Agriculture in India is in crisis with the out-migration of men from farming to towns, cities or other rural areas in search of work, leaving the running of farms to women. The resulting feminization has ominous implications for food security and rural livelihoods. Women seem to be in a no-win situation where work burdens and responsibilities have increased without enhancement of productivity or earnings.

The book is divided into two parts: Part I, Perspectives, examines conceptual and macro issues; Part II, Regional Insights, presents field studies, discussing the day-to-day implications of the crisis. Offering an engaged and lively debate, these contributions raise important questions that affect the well-being of countless women who are engaged in agriculture.

Maithreyi Krishnaraj was formerly professor and director, and presently Senior Honorary Fellow, Research Centre for Women’s Studies, SNDT Women’s University.

Contributors: Sara Ahmed, Pralhad Burli, Barbara Harris-White, Mahabub Hossain, Aruna Kanchi, Praveena Kodoth, Maithreyi Krishnaraj, Joyce Luis, Kanchan Mathur, Alka Parikh, Thelma Paris, Nitya Rao, Amita Shah, Abha Singh, Swarna Sadasivam Vepa.

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The Weave of My Life: A Dalit Woman’s Memoirs

The Weave of My Life: A Dalit Woman’s Memoirs

Urmila Pawar

Translated from the Marathi by Maya Pandit

Afterword by Sharmila Rege

demy octavo pb 348pp ISBN 9788185604909 Rs 375 Aug 2008

Aaydan, Urmila Pawar’s thought-provoking memoirs, spares no one, including herself. The author links her mother’s act of weaving baskets, aaydans, to her own ‘act of writing’. Translated for the first time into English as The Weave of My Life, Urmila’s memoirs describes the long journey from a Konkan village to Mumbai, bringing to fruition the struggle of three generations for a dalit modernity, about which readers have hitherto heard so little.

Urmila writes frankly of the ‘private’ and ‘public’ aspects of her life: of falling in love with Harishchandra as a young teenager, and marrying him in the teeth of family opposition, of the young couple and their children moving to Mumbai, of her many sustaining friendships with women and her work. Her talking openly about familial and marital conflicts, of the grievous shocks that life dealt her, outraged male dalit writers. A long-term member of the dalit and women’s movements, Urmila Pawar offers a cogent critique of feminist and dalit-politics. Her account of how she began to write, to participate in dalit literary conferences and founded a women’s literary conference are engaging. Like her work with Meenakshi Moon on dalit women in Ambedkarite movement, now archived, her memoirs too are of high documentary value. Sharmila Rege provides an incisive Afterword, placing the book within its tumultuous social context.

Urmila Pawar is a distinguished writer of fiction in Marathi. Her autobiography, Aaydan, received major awards, Maharashtra Foundation, USA, Padmashree Vikhe Patil; Matoshree Bheemabai Ambedkar; Priyadarshini Academy. A noted translator of Marathi literature into English, Maya Pandit is Professor, department of ELT, EFLU, Hyderabad. Sharmila Rege is Professor of Sociology, University of Pune.

Review

'Aydaan was published when Pawar was 58. Yet, writing about her childhood, she slips easily and unaffectedly into the dialect of her growing-up years. Her language changes imperceptibly as she moves into adolescence, lit up by her love for Harishchandra till, in the final section, it acquires the polish of standard Marathi. Pawar’s language thus mirrors the journey she had made from the days when she avoided both baths and school to a time when she yearned for knowledge and visited dalit bastis advising women on cleanliness and hygiene. There is one feature of her persona that runs through the entire account — her ironic view of life and her irrepressible sense of humour. The latter is brilliantly revealed in her account of her first night with her husband in a crummy lodge with a bagful of live clams, her mother’s gift, chattering away under the bed...

Maya Pandit’s Introduction is illuminating. It locates Pawar’s book in the intertwining social contexts of caste and women’s issues, and in the literary context of autobiographies by members of the scheduled castes and scheduled and nomadic tribes that had appeared in the 25 years preceding her memoirs, starting with Daya Pawar’s Baluta, which first shook the upper-caste, middle-class reading public out of their complacence'.

Shanta Gokhale: The Hindu Literary Review 1 Feb, 2009

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Means of Awakening: Gender, Politics and Practice in Rural India

Means of Awakening: Gender, Politics and Practice in Rural India

Sirpa Tenhunen

demy octavo pb 250pp ISBN 81-85604-97-5 Rs 345 Nov 2008

Providing an ethnographically rich study of local politics and gender in rural India, this book is based on the author’s extensive fieldwork in Janata, a village near Vishnupur in Bankura, West Bengal. She documents how women are emerging in the forefront of political struggles. The book explores both women’s political participation and agency, including marriage, dowry and women’s role in the panchayats. She notes how building of mobile networks has led to the intensification of rural networks. Tenhunen argues that the gendered understanding of politics not only limits women’s political participation, but also enables and shapes women’s political action and critical discourses because the local concept of politics does not exclude home kinship and the women’s domain.

Sirpa Tenhunen is an Academy Research Fellow at the Academy of Finland and the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Helsinki.  She has co-edited with Lina Fruzzetti, Culture, Power and Agency: Gender in Indian Ethnography (Stree, 2006).

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The Trauma and the Triumph: Gender and Partition in the Eastern Region, vols. 1 & 2

The Trauma and the Triumph: Gender and Partition

in the Eastern Region, vols. 1 & 2

Edited by Jasodhara Bagchi and Subhoranjan Dasgupta

demy octavo pb 284pp ISBN 81-85604-64-9 Rs 350 2003 rpt 2007

demy octavo hb 250pp ISBN 978-81-85604-98-5 Rs 500 Dec 2008

The trauma of the partition in Eastern India is discussed explicitly in a way that has not happened earlier. Drawing upon interviews with women who were uprooted from old East Bengal in 1947, on diaries, memoirs and creative literature, the editors lift the ‘veil of silence’ that has surrounded Partition. The lack of overt public discourse has meant that people outside Bengal have tended to believe that the impact was very much less on the people in the eastern region. In truth, the sufferings, the loss of life and livelihoods and of shelter were very real but of a different nature from the fast-moving horror of the Punjab. It was more like an oozing wound that seemed not to heal than a one-time severance of a limb.

Weaving together the voices of many women and incisive analysis, the book provides an invaluable discussion on displacement, rape, loss and why women pay the price.

Continuing the discussion on Partition in the Eastern Region in volume 2, the editors present another portrait through literature, interviews, surveys and documents. Much of the material has been translated for the first time from Bengali. What is particularly interesting is that contributions, whether in fiction, interviews, or memoirs, are from both sides of the border so that the full force of what Partition wrought is revealed.

Jasodhara Bagchi retired as Chairperson of the West Bengal Commission for Women. Subhoranjan Dasgupta is Professor, Human Sciences, Institute of Development Studies Kolkata.

Review:

‘Family histories of Partition make a strong statement about social transformation. The trauma of families during Partition has been extensively documented but the book under review takes a fresh look at this issue from a gendered point of view. Drawing upon interviews with women uprooted from old East Bengal, diaries, memoirs and creative literature, the editors Jasodhara Bagchi and Subhoranjan Dasgupta “lift the veil of silence” that has surrounded the Bengal Partition of 1947.

Weaving together the voices of many women with compassion and incisive analysis, this book brings to the fore the tragedy and triumph of the displaced women of Bengal. It is a rare chronicle of women’s suffering.’

Kanchi Dasgupta: The Sunday Statesman Magazine, 22 August 2004

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The Road Less Travelled: The Life and Writings of Vinodinee Neelkanth

The Road Less Travelled: The Life and Writings of Vinodinee Neelkanth

Biographical Sketch by Aparna Basu and Shailaja Kalelkar Parikh

demy octavo pb 336pp ISBN 81-85604-71-1 Rs 375 March 2009

A pioneer who was an early emancipated woman, Vinodinee Neelkanth (1907-1987) lived her life according to her own beliefs and convictions. As early as 1929 she won a scholarship to do a Masters at the University of Michigan. Born into a leading reformist family of Gujarat, she made bold and unconventional choices in her life. She began writing in 1928, her essays becoming milestones in Gujarati literature. Her short stories and novel focused mainly on women. Most of her journalistic writings aimed at encouraging women to speak up for themselves. As she strove to give women a sense of identity, she may be regarded a s precursor of feminist literature in Gujarat.

Part I offers a brief biography; Part II consists of translations of selected pieces of her writings from all genres, giving an insight into the social changes that was taking place and that Vinodinee supported. This book is a path-breaking collection on women’s status in early twentieth-century Gujarat.

Aparna Basu retired as professor of history, University of Delhi and was President, All India Women’s Conference. Shailaja Kalelkar Parikh was formerly a lecturer in political science and journalism and is a freelance writer.

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The Dark Sun and The Woman Who Wore a Hat

The Dark Sun and The Woman Who Wore a Hat

Kamal Desai

Translated from the Marathi by Sukhmani Roy

demy octavo pb 166pp 9 ISBN 81-85604-07-X Rs 140 Feb 1999

This translation provides access to two major works of a leading Marathi writer. The two novellas embody the tensions and cross-currents of an indigenous modernity even as they deconstruct it. Kamal Desai’s fiction is focused on the micro-levels of inner life where experience is held together by the compelling and never predictable struggle for selfhood. Nearly always, subtle and ongoing antagonisms structure and threaten Kamal Desai’s imagined communities.

           

A distinguished student and teacher of Marathi literature, Kamal Desai was born in 1928. Among her major books are Ratrandin Amha Yuddhacha Prasanga (We Are Confronting the War, Day and Night); Ranga (1962); Kala Surya and Hat Ghalnari Bai (1975). Sukhmani Roy associate professor, Department of English Literature and Language at P.N. Doshi College of Arts and K.U. R.Shah Women's College of Commerce, Ghatkopar, Bombay.

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