Ritu Menon

memoirs from the women's movement in India

Making a difference

Women from Pakistan, India and Bangladesh Write on the Partition India

No Woman's Land

Diary of a Happy Traveller

Loitering with Intent

Kamla Bhasin

On the sufferings of women during the partition of India in 1947; includes personal narratives.

Women in India's Partition

Borders & Boundaries

Description Zohra Segal (1912-2014) spanned an Indian century of the arts and became the only woman to make a mark in all the performing arts, with the exception of music, within the country and abroad. This elegant biography traces her remarkable journey. Born into a family with connections to the nawabs of Rampur, Zohra Mumtazullah Khan chose adventure over tradition when she was eighteen, travelling to Germany to learn modern dance. For the rest of her life, she continued to defy convention and was associated with transformative initiatives in the arts. In 1935, she was recruited by the bohemian genius Uday Shankar and toured the world with his dance troupe, until he disbanded it. In 1943, she set up a unique dance school in Lahore with her husband Kameshwar Segal, eight years her junior. In Bombay two years later, she joined Prithvi Theatres, founded by the legendary Prithviraj Kapoor. For the next fourteen years she travelled across India, taking socially relevant plays directly to the people-through the turbulence of Partition and the heady idealism following Independence, and the tragedy of Kameshwar's suicide. In 1962, Zohra went to London on a drama scholarship and stayed on for twenty-five years, becoming part of a tiny band of Asian artistes who would change the complexion of British theatre. From here to her participation in pioneering TV series and films like Doctor Who, Jewel in the Crown and Bhaji on the Beach was a natural progression. Back in India, she was surprised to find Bollywood at her door when she was well past eighty. Playing the unconventional grandmother-by turns charming and crusty-she became a household name. In this biography of the unlikely star, Ritu Menon helps us understand both the performer and the person, and the times she lived in.

ZOHRA! A BIOGRAPHY IN FOUR ACTS

Zoya Hasan

This survey based study of Muslim women in India seeks to dispel popular misperceptions and stereotypes regarding their status, as well as seriously engage with academic debates on gender and Islam.

A Study of Muslim Women in India

Unequal Citizens

Kalpana Kannabirān

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.

Resisting Violence Against Women in India

From Mathura to Manorama

Ritu Menon

Books

Your next favorite book is out there