Gendered Publics: Chandraprava Saikiani and the Mahila Samiti in Colonial Assam (Oxford UP, 2024) is a first-of-its-kind comprehensive appraisal of the relatively unexplored but highly impactful women’s associations, the Assam Mahila Samiti (1926 cont.) which led one of the most remarkable women’s movements in colonial India; Sucheta Kripalani praised it as the ‘largest democratic women’s association in India’ in 1949. Central to the Assam Mahila Samiti story is its founding Secretary, the firebrand feminist Chandraprava Saikiani (1901–72), who while being an unwed mother and belonging to a lower caste, was a celebrated writer, mobilizer, and publisher. The book traverses these individual and collective journeys from the 1920s to the 1950s and explores how women’s movements evolve in conversation/contestation with both traditional spaces such as naam kirtan and contemporary ones of tribal-caste associations, anti-colonial movements, and international ideological paradigms such as the Bolshevik revolution.
The book also plots through specific examples, such as the controversy surrounding the Samiti’s serving of a legal notice to a groom in 1934 to stop child marriage, to argue that gender may not function merely as constitutive of the public, but women’s collectives may shape, transform, and orchestrate a veritable gendered public, resistant to both native patriarchy and sometimes to colonial authority. The study makes crucial methodological intervention through an interdisciplinary approach by constantly juxtaposing print sources with handwritten minutes of early mahila samiti meetings, performative spaces such as women’s singing of naam kirtan and women’s weaving, and women’s memory (recorded as part of a digital archive of the mahila samitis in Assam).
Rituparna Patgiri has a PhD in Sociology from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. Her research interests lie in the areas of food, media, gender and public. She is also one of the co-founders of Doing Sociology. Patgiri can be reached at @Rituparna37 on Twitter.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Samantha Majic, "Lights, Camera, Feminism?: Celebrities and Anti-Trafficking Politics" (U California Press, 2023)
Jacqueline Kennelly, "Burnt by Democracy: Youth, Inequality, and the Erosion of Civic Life" (U Toronto Press, 2023)
Emily Lynell Edwards, "Digital Islamophobia: Tracking a Far-Right Crisis" (de Gruyter, 2023)
Laurie L. Patton, "Who Owns Religion?: Scholars and Their Publics in the Late Twentieth Century" (U Chicago Press, 2019)
Michael Poulshock, "Power Structures in International Politics" (Low 8, 2023)
Charlotte Witt, "Social Goodness: The Ontology of Social Norms" (Oxford UP, 2023)
Derron Wallace, "The Culture Trap: Ethnic Expectations and Unequal Schooling for Black Youth" (Oxford UP, 2023)
Will Rollason and Eric Hirsch eds., "Compliance: Cultures and Networks of Accommodation" (Berghahn Books, 2023)
Jinying Li, "Anime's Knowledge Cultures: Geek, Otaku, Zhai" (U Minnesota Press, 2024)
Poppy Wilde, "Posthuman Gaming: Avatars, Gamers, and Entangled Subjectivities" (Routledge, 2023)
Terry Williams, "Life Underground: Encounters with People Below the Streets of New York" (Columbia UP, 2024)
Thomas J. Barfield, "Shadow Empires: An Alternative Imperial History" (Princeton UP, 2023)
Steve Ferzacca, "Sonic City: Making Rock Music and Urban Life in Singapore" (NUS Press, 2021)
Ina Marie Lunde Ilkama, "The Play of the Feminine" (HASP, 2023)
Alessandro Gerosa, "The Hipster Economy: Taste and Authenticity in Late Modern Capitalism (UCL Press, 2024)
Mai Corlin, "The Bishan Commune and the Practice of Socially Engaged Art in Rural China" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2020)
Yanis Varoufakis, "Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism" (Melville House, 2023)
Aaron J. Jackson, "Worlds of Care: The Emotional Lives of Fathers Caring for Children with Disabilities" (U California Press, 2021)
Calla Hummel, "Why Informal Workers Organize: Contentious Politics, Enforcement, and the State" (Oxford UP, 2022)
Sandra Fahy, "Dying for Rights: Putting North Korea’s Human Rights Abuses on the Record" (Columbia UP, 2019)
Create your
podcast in
minutes
It is Free
New Books in Philosophy
New Books in Psychoanalysis
New Books in Anthropology
New Books in African American Studies
New Books in Islamic Studies