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Women, Gender and History in India examines Indian history through a thematic lens of women and gender across different contexts.Through an inter-disciplinary approach, Nita Kumar uses sources from literature, folklore, religion, and art to discuss historical and anthropological ways of interpreting the issues surrounding women and gender in history. As part of the scholarly movement away from a Grand Narrative of South Asian history and culture, this volume places emphasis on the diversity of women and their experiences. It does this by including analyses of many different primary sources together with discussion around a wide variety of theoretical and methodological debates – from the mixed role of colonial law and education to the conundrum of a patriarchy that worships the Goddess while it strives to keep women in subservience.This textbook is essential reading for those studying Indian history and women and gender studies.

Until the 1970s gender had been invisible in analyses of social space and place in the androcentric discipline of geography. While recent contributions to feminist geography have challenged this, in India the engagement of geographers with gender, by being conservative in its choice of focus and orthodox in methodology, has been unable to destabilise the established disciplinary order. However, with younger scholars becoming increasingly interested in studying gender in geography, novel and innovative methods that include combinations of quantitative and qualitative analyses, visual sources and in-depth case studies are being tried out and accepted in geography despite its masculine legacy.This pioneering study brings together Indian geographers'contributions to understanding gender, and through them, seeks to enrich the discipline of geography. It engages with the recent ‘spatial turn'in the social sciences, which has reclaimed the explanatory power of space and place in social theory that had been nearly lost to deconstructive postmodernist scholarship. The volume draws entirely from the Indian scholarship, showcasing contextualised knowledge production, but hopes to initiate a a dialogue with scholars elsewhere working with feminist methodologies.

Women in the thraldom of man has led sometimes, in one form or another, to the most horrible abuses. In this book, originally published in 1939, the author traces and analyses the institutions of marriage and family in India. The women of India, after their ancient matriarchal supremacy, declined into medieval degradation and slavery, brought about by subtle and prolonged subjugation by men through the instrumentality of legal restraints, supposed religious grounds, the Purdah, child-marriage and widow-burning. These iniquities were practised under the sanctified excuse of matrimony.The author points out, in this objective sociological study, practical methods of emancipation of Indian women, and urges the necessity for a radical change of values which would give the greater impetus to these vitally necessary reforms.The book is of especial interest as a sociological study of a curious and cruel form of organized inhumanity. Today it can be read and enjoyed in its historical context.This book is a re-issue originally published in 1939. The language used and views portrayed are a reflection of its era and no offence is meant by the Publishers to any reader by this re-publication.