This book analyses the status of women in Bengal, India, by examining the versatile everyday living conditions of women, and how they are represented as individuals and as a category in the media.
Contributors to the book start their discussion from the point that women in India have a varied experience of living, thinking, and acting specific to the regional cultural context. Caste ideology specified privileges and sanctions according to innate attributes, differ by sex as well as ethnicity, class, caste, minority status, and marginal position intersect lives and render unique life experiences. With a focus on women and their lived experiences, performances by them and performances imitating women’s roles, the book offers a complex and rich analysis of the reality of women’s lives based on research and reflections by 25 scholars. Organised into two sections, the book presents women in reality, their living conditions, struggles, and women as represented in films, stories, framed in plots sometimes by women and sometimes by men. The chapters provide insights on how institutionalised gender distinctions create subordination and marginality of women and their struggles to survive in a society dominated by heteropatriarchal ideology and its practice.
This book improves our understanding of various dimensions of gender and transgender relations in India. It will be of interest to researchers in Gender Studies, South Asian Culture and Society, and Studies on India.
Introduction Part I: Women in Bengal: In Reality Chapter 1. The Partition, Changing Mindscapes and Evolving Contours of Intimacy; Chapter 2. Peeping in a Girls’ Madrasa in Malda: Getting an Insider’s view; Chapter 3. Debating the Livelihood Narratives of Home-based Zari Working Women of Panchla Area, West Bengal; Chapter 4. Care Crises Facing the Urban Middle-Class Elderly Women in India; Chapter 5. Exploring Liminal Identities in Indigenous Jatra Performances; Chapter 6. Contradictions at the Feminine Space of a Kali Temple; Chapter 7. Plight of Tiger widows of Sundarbans: Their Struggle, Cyclone and Pandemic; Chapter 8. Acid Attacks in West Bengal; Chapter 9. Motherhood: A Sacred desire or predicament? Chapter 10. Unfolding Voices: Addressing the issues of Inconsistencies in studying The Indian Jewish Women; Chapter 11. Conflicting well-being of earth and future generation: Gendered fertility crisis in West Bengal; Chapter 12. Political Perception and Engagement of selected women professional of Kolkata: A Qualitative Focus Group Study; Chapter 13. Looking forward at Livelihood Question Through the Lens of Gender and Sexuality as perceived by Transfeminine Individuals; Chapter 14. Relocating the subaltern voice in the ‘hijra’ subjectivity(s): a Sociological Analysis of a lifestory; Chapter 15. The ‘Invisible Half’: Women’s Work in India in the Twenty-First Century; Chapter 16. Women, Linguistic Violence and Marginalization in India: An Exploration; Chapter 17. Exploring Institutional Birth and Organizational Culture: A Case Study of Matritva-Griha Part II: Women in Bengal: Through Representations Chapter 18. Anglo-Indian Women in Indian Cinema: Characters and Performances; Chapter 19. Hyper Visible or Visibly Undervalued? Women in Post Pandemic Bengali Print Advertisement; Chapter 20. Denying Manhood and Becoming Women: Case Studies from India’s Past and Present; Chapter 21. Sociological Study on the Journey of Devi Manasa towards the acknowledgement of her Divinity; Chapter 22. Donna Hoke's Digital Essay on Intimate (Male) Rape, Epistemic Apertures, and Fourth- Wave Feminism in India: An Argument; Chapter 23. Social Media Advertisements and Women’s Empowerment: Imprints of Change? Chapter 24. Women in Rituparno Ghosh’s Cinema: A Selective Study; Chapter 25. Centering the Margin: Rabindranath Tagore, Nation-building and Mother-Child Intimacy; Appendix; Index
Sudarshana Sen is Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology, University of Gour Banga, India. She is the author of Anglo-Indian Women in Transition (2017).
