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
Chris Richardson, "Batman and the Joker: Contested Sexuality in Popular Culture" (Routledge, 2020)
How Mechanisms of Psychoanalytic Defense Perpetuate Racism in America
Fabio Rambelli, "Spirits and Animism in Contemporary Japan" (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019)
Beth Driscoll, "What Readers Do: Aesthetic and Moral Practices of a Post-Digital Age" (Bloomsbury, 2024)
Tadashi Dozono, "Discipline Problems: How Students of Color Trouble Whiteness in Schools" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024)
Mel Stanfill, "Fandom Is Ugly: Networked Harassment in Participatory Culture" (NYU Press, 2024)
Lise Butler, "Michael Young, Social Science, and the British Left, 1945-1970" (Oxford UP, 2020)
Tracy Pintchman, "Goddess Beyond Boundaries: Worshipping the Eternal Mother at a North American Hindu Temple" (Oxford UP, 2023)
Jonathan Shapiro Anjaria, "Mumbai on Two Wheels: Cycling, Urban Space, and Sustainable Mobility" (U Washington Press, 2024)
Yerkebulan Sairambay, "New Media and Political Participation in Russia and Kazakhstan" (Rowman and Littlefield, 2023)
Francisca Yuenki Lai, "Maid to Queer: Asian Labor Migration and Female Same-Sex Desires" (Hong Kong UP, 2021)
Bessie N. Rigakos and Wesley R. Bishop, "Liberating Fat Bodies: Social Media Censorship and Body Size Activism" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024)
Lost in Ideology: A Conversation with Jason Blakely
Joseph Heathcott, "Global Queens: An Urban Mosaic" (Fordham UP, 2023)
Le Lin, "The Fruits of Opportunism: Noncompliance and the Evolution of China's Supplemental Education Industry" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
Peter Allen, “The Political Class: Why It Matters Who Our Politicians Are” (Oxford UP, 2018)
Karen Tongson, "Normporn: Queer Viewers and the TV That Soothes Us" (NYU Press, 2023)
Stephanie L Canizales, "Sin Padres, Ni Papeles: Unaccompanied Migrant Youth Coming of Age in the United States" (U California Press, 2024)
Carole Ammann, "Women, Agency, and the State in Guinea: Silent Politics" (Routledge, 2020)
Isabel Bramsen, "The Micro-Sociology of Peace and Conflict" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
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