Vasantha Kannabiran

Kalpana Kannabirān

Focusing on the many hegemonies that confront women and men today, the authors present fresh insights on the linkages among gender, culture and politics. Their 'concerns in politics have centred on questions of culture and representation, on power and hegemonies that find legitimacy, in globalisation, and the imperatives of anti-communal struggles'. They analyse the coalition between globalisation and fundamentalism and consider the disturbing portents for women, children, minorities and dalits. While reflecting on the increase in state repression, they also critique the way the Left revolutionary parties too restrict women's engagement.

Essays on Modesty, Honour and Power

De-eroticizing Assault

This volume looks at the experience and articulation of violence against women in relation to feminist debates and organising on the issue and the positive/negative responses to that articulation particularly from the standpoint of law and the institutional apparatuses of the state. Its several essays focus on everyday settings from justice dispensed by traditional authorities to modern courtrooms domestic spaces a home for mentally disabled women in Pune a factory in Tamil Nadu. Moving from the routine to the extraordinary the essays analyse the spectrum of violence against women that covers witch hunting in Adivasi communities structural adjustment programmes and economic violence against sexually marginalised groups and against women of religious and ethnic minorities. Read together they expose the extent of systemic violence against women in India a violence so routine that everyday forms of it slide into the gross and macabre in a seamless continuum.

Essays on Women's Lived Realities

The Violence of Normal Times

Ritu Menon

From the late 1970s to the present, feminists in India have had to deal with spiralling violence against women and the alarming ramifications of its forms, as well as assess their strategies to combat it. This monograph reviews twenty-five years of protest and action by them, in an attempt to take both our analysis and theories forward. It maps the trajectory of feminist organising in India in the post-Emergency period, after 1977; the paths of legal reform and the points at which they have intersected with, or resulted from, feminist campaigns; the texture of campaigns and the creativity with which women's groups have fashioned and sustained difficult struggles against violence; the persistence of feminist interventions and the ways in which different groups have been able to tilt the balance in favour of women in perceptible ways; and the escalation of collective violence, increasingly by agents of the state, against women. Notwithstanding the diversity of formal political affiliations and theoretical analyses within the women's movement, the last twenty-five years have seen the evolution of a minimum consensus that categorically rejects any rationalisation of violence against women, even while recognising its complexity.

Kalpana Kannabirān

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