Women and Social Reform in Modern India

Sumit Sarkar is Retired Professor of History at the University of Delhi. His books include Beyond Nationalist Frames: Postmodernism, Hindu Fundamentalism, History (IUP, 2002) and Writing Social History. Tanika Sarkar is Professor at the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University. She is author of Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation: Community, Religion, and Cultural Nationalism (IUP, 2001) and co-editor of Women and Right-Wing Movements.

Contents: Introduction / Tanika Sarkar & Sumit Sarkar PART A: HISTORICAL RESEARCH Whose Sati?: Widow Burning in Early-Nineteenth-Century India / Anand A. Yang; Production of an Official Discourse on Sati in Early-Nineteenth-Century Bengal / Lata Mani; Education for Women / Geraldine Forbes; Law, Custom and Statutory Social Reform: The Hindu Widows' Remarriage Act of 1856 / Lucy Carroll; Caste, Widow-Remarriage, and the Reform of Popular Culture in Colonial Bengal / Sekhar Bandyopadhyay; Vidyasagar and Brahmanical Society / Sumit Sarkar' Customs in a Peasant Economy: Women in Colonial Haryana / Prem Chowdhry; Silencing Heresy / Gauri Viswanathan; The Daughters of Aryavarta / Madhu Kishwar; Viresalingam and the Ideology of Social Change in Andhra / John & Karen Leonard; Conjugality and Hindu Nationalism: Resisting Colonial Reason and the Death of a Child-Wife / Tanika Sarkar; Rebellious Wives and Dysfunctional Marriages: Indian Women's Discourses and Participation in the Debates over Restitution of Conjugal Rights and the Child Marriage Controversy in the 1880s and 1890s / Padma Anagol; Punjab and the North-West / Kenneth Jones; Muslim Women and the Control of Property in North India / Gregory C. Kozlowski; Prize-Winning Adab: A Study of Five Urdu Books Written in Response to the Allahabad Government Gazette Notification / C.M. Naim; Sayyid Mumtaz 'Ali and Tahzib un-Niswan: Women's Rights in Islam and Women's Journalism in Urdu / Gail Minault; Gender and the Politics of Space: The Movement for Women's Reform, 1857-1900 / Faisal Fatehali Devji; Women's Question in the Dravidian Movement c. 1925-1948 / S. Anandhi; Multiple Meanings: Changing Conceptions of Matrilineal Kinship in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Malabar / G. Arunima; Women and Gender in the Study of Tribes in India / Virginius Xaxa; The 'Second Women's War' and the Emergence of Democratic Government in Manipur / Saroj N. Arambam Parratt & John Parratt; Gender in the Critique of Colonialism and Nationalism: Locating the 'Indian Woman' / Mrinalini Sinha; Jawaharlal Nehru and the Hindu Code: A Victory of Symbol over Substance? / Reba Som PART B: CONTEMPORARY DOCUMENTS Tracts against Sati / Rammohan Roy; The Woeful Plight of Hindu Women / Kailashbasini Devi; From Stripurusha Tulana / Tarabai Shinde; From Miscellaneous Writings / M.G. Ranade; The Worship of Women / Begum Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain