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Female Infanticide in India is a theoretical and discursive intervention in the field of postcolonial feminist theory. It focuses on the devaluation of women through an examination of the practice of female infanticide in colonial India and the reemergence of this practice in the form of femicide (selective killing of female fetuses) in postcolonial India. The authors argue that femicide is seen as part of the continuum of violence on, and devaluation of, the postcolonial girl-child and woman. In order to fully understand the material and discursive practices through which the limited and localized crime of female infanticide in colonial India became a generalized practice of femicide in postcolonial India, the authors closely examine the progressivist British-colonial history of the discovery, reform, and eradication of the practice of female infanticide. Contemporary tactics of resistance are offered in the closing chapters.

In Beyond Partition , Deepti Misri shows how 1947 marked the beginning of a history of politicized animosity associated with the differing ideas of \"India\" held by communities and in regions on one hand, and by the political-military Indian state on the other. Assembling literary, historiographic, performative, and visual representations of gendered violence against men and women, she establishes that cultural expressions do not just follow violence but determine its very contours, and interrogates the gendered scripts underwriting the violence originating in the contested visions of what \"India\" means. Ambitious and ranging across disciplines, Beyond Partition offers both an overview of and nuanced new perspectives on the ways caste, identity, and class complicate representations of violence, and how such representations shape our understandings of both violence and of India.

In this powerful, compassionate work, one of anthropology's most distinguished ethnographers weaves together rich fieldwork with a compelling critical analysis in a book that will surely make a signal contribution to contemporary thinking about violence and how it affects everyday life. Veena Das examines case studies including the extreme violence of the Partition of India in 1947 and the massacre of Sikhs in 1984 after the assassination of then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. In a major departure from much anthropological inquiry, Das asks how this violence has entered \"the recesses of the ordinary\" instead of viewing it as an interruption of life to which we simply bear witness. Das engages with anthropological work on collective violence, rumor, sectarian conflict, new kinship, and state and bureaucracy as she embarks on a wide-ranging exploration of the relations among violence, gender, and subjectivity. Weaving anthropological and philosophical reflections on the ordinary into her analysis, Das points toward a new way of interpreting violence in societies and cultures around the globe. The book will be indispensable reading across disciplinary boundaries as we strive to better understand violence, especially as it is perpetrated against women.

Nyla Ali Khan, the granddaughter of the first Prime Minister of Jammu and Kashmir, Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah, gives an insider's analysis on the political and social turmoil that has eroded the ethos and fabric of Kasmiri culture. She monitors the effects of nationalist, militant, and religious discourses and praxes on a gender-based hierarchy.

Rebecca J. Cook and the contributors to this volume seek to analyze how international human rights law applies specifically to women in various cultures worldwide, and to develop strategies to promote equitable application of human rights law at the international, regional, and domestic levels. Their essays present a compelling mixture of reports and case studies from various regions in the world, combined with scholarly assessments of international law as these rights specifically apply to women.

The role of family context in determining women's agency has been addressed through kinship patterns, household structure, and domestic violence. This study suggests that another aspect of family context— family relationship quality— can also influence women's agency. Data from the Women's Reproductive Histories Survey, collected in Madhya Pradesh, India, are used to examine whether family relationship quality is a determinant of women's agency. Results show that women with higher quality relationships with husbands and parents-in-law do have greater agency. Further, family relationship quality is just as influential as other well known determinants of agency, including education and employment.

The report is organized around three chapters, in addition to this overview, each one dealing with an excluded group: Scheduled Tribe (ST), Scheduled Caste (SC), and women. The objective is to provide a diagnostic of how the three excluded groups under analysis have fared along various development indicators during a period of rapid economic growth in the national economy. In seeking this objective, the report also addresses correlates and the processes that explain how and why these groups have fared the way they have over a period of time. Chapter two in this report focuses on the Adivasis or STs. In most analyses, this topic is addressed after the Dalits, but the author has placed it first for analytical and organizational purposes. There are two reasons for this: tribal groups are not strictly within the caste system, and the bonds of rituals do not affect their relations with the world in general. Also the report shows that outcomes among Adivasis are among the worst, despite considerable variation across places of residence and tribal groupings. Finally, Chapter three focuses on Dalits, a term that has united the SCs in a process that is more empowering than the process of identification by individual names, which have been and continue to be associated with ritually impure occupations.

A new reflection on rape in wartime, this collection of essays presents 14 case studies, covering conflicts from across the globe, including Greece, Bangladesh, Columbia, Chechnya, Israel, India, Nigeria and Europe. Providing a truly global and interdisciplinary approach - including offerings from experts in legal, anthropological, cultural and gender studies - the authors examine the context in which wartime rape occurs, the specificity of rape as a universally recognised transgression, the place of large scale rape in public memories of war and the long term legacies of rape. They also confront the challenge of writing about intimate forms of violence from both the human and scientific perspective.

The Hindu custom of dowry has long been blamed for the murder of wives and female infants in India. In this highly provocative book, Veena Oldenburg argues that these killings are neither about dowry nor reflective of an Indian culture or caste system that encourages violence against women. Rather, such killings can be traced directly to the influences of the British colonial era. In the precolonial period, dowry was an institution managed by women, for women, to enable them to establish their status and have recourse in an emergency. As a consequence of the massive economic and societal upheaval brought on by British rule, women's entitlements to the precious resources obtained from land were erased and their control of the system diminished, ultimately resulting in a devaluing of their very lives. Taking us on a journey into the colonial Punjab, Veena Oldenburg skillfully follows the paper trail left by British bureaucrats to indict them for interpreting these crimes against women as the inherent defects of Hindu caste culture. The British, Oldenburg claims, publicized their \"civilizing mission\" and blamed the caste system in order to cover up the devastation their own agrarian policies had wrought on the Indian countryside. A forceful demystification of contemporary bride burning concludes this remarkably original book. Deploying her own experiences and memories and her research at a women's shelter with \"dowry cases\" for almost a year in the mid-eighties, the author looks at the contemporary violence against wives and daughters-in-law in modern India. Oldenburg seamlessly weaves the contemporary with the historical, the personal with the political, and strips the layers of exoticism off an ancient practice to show how an invaluable safety net was twisted into a deadly noose. She brings us startlingly close to the worsening treatment of modern Indian women as she challenges us to rethink basic assumptions about womens human and economic rights. Combining rigorous research with impassioned analysis and a nuanced treatment of a complex, deeply controversial subject, this book critiques colonialism while holding a mirror to gender discrimination in modern India.

Focusing on an inner-city college in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, South India, the article investigates the sexual harassment of female students. Locating this violence within the context of social changes resulting from India's integration into the global economy, the article argues that, in this context, sexual harassment is a manifestation of instrumental violence, deployed by subaltern or Scheduled Caste youths to contest their subordination within higher education and the 'white-collar' employment market. However, this contest reveals a number of ambivalences through which these subaltern masculinities are constituted. Rationalizing their sexual harassment, the protagonists' narratives, therefore, oscillate between denigrating 'Westernization' while valorizing Tamil culture ideals, and vice versa. This conflict is centred on intense competition for male privilege and status between the newly emerged middle-class elite and impoverished low-caste groups, effectively reworking the social history of youth masculinity to meet the demands of new economic and political conditions. /// À partir du cas d'un collège urbain de Chennai dans le Tamil Nadu, dans le sud de l'Inde, le présent article étudie le harcèlement sexuel des étudiantes. En resituant cette violence dans le cadre des changements sociaux résultant de l'intégration de l'Inde dans l'économie mondiale, l'auteur affirme que dans ce contexte, le harcèlement sexuel est une manifestation de violence instrumentalisée par les jeunes hommes des castes subalternes ou répertoriées (scheduled) pour contester leur subordination sur le marché de l'éducation supérieure et de l' emploi \"en col blanc\". Cette rivalité révèle toutefois un certain nombre d'ambivalences par lesquelles ces masculinités subalternes se constituent. Les récits de protagonistes oscillent donc, pour justifier leur harcèlement sexuel, entre le dénigrement de \"l'occidentalisation\" associé à l'exaltation des idéaux culturels tamouls et vice versa. Ce conflit se cristallise dans une compétition intense à propos des prérogatives et du statut masculins entre la nouvelle élite des classes moyennes émergentes et les basses castes appauvries. De fait, il revisite l'histoire sociale de la masculinité des jeunes gens dans l'optique des nouvelles conditions économiques et politiques.