This new edition of the Routledge Handbook of Gender in South Asia provides a comprehensive overview of the study of gender in South Asia. The Handbook covers the central contributions that have defi ned this area and captures innovative and emerging paradigms that are shaping the future of the field. It offers a wide range of disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives spanning both the humanities and social sciences, focusing on India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. This revised edition has been thoroughly updated and includes new chapters, thus adding new areas of scholarship. The Handbook is organized thematically into five major parts:
• Historical formations and theoretical framings
• Law, citizenship and the nation
• Representations of culture, place, identity
• Labor and the economy
• Inequality, activism and the state
The Handbook illustrates the ways in which scholarship on gender has contributed to a rethink of theoretical concepts and empirical understandings of contemporary South Asia. Finally, it focuses on new areas of inquiry that have been opened up through a focus on gender and the intersections between gender and categories, such as caste, ethnicity, sexuality, and religion. This timely study is essential reading for scholars who research and teach on South Asia as well as for scholars in related interdisciplinary fields that focus on women and gender from comparative and transnational perspectives.
Part I Historical Formations and Theoretical Framings
1. Gendered Nationalism: From Women to Gender and Back Again?
Mrinalini Sinha
2. Construction of Gender in the Late nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century in Muslim Bengal: The writings of Nawab
Firdous Azim and Perween Hasan
3. Gender, Women and Partition: Literary Representations, Refugee Women and Partition Studies
Paulomi Chakraborty
4. The Contact Zones of Intersectionality: Inequality and Knowledge Production on India
Leela Fernandes
5. Dalit Feminist Thought
Shailaja Paik
6. Brahmanical Ignorance and Dominant Indian Feminism's Origin Stories
Dia D'Costa
Part II Law Citizenship and the Nation
7. Gender and Citizenship in India
Anupama Roy
8. Gender, Activism and Democratic Politics in Bangladesh
Elora Shehabuddin
9. Law, Sex Work and Activism in India
Prabha Kotiswaran
10. The Supreme Court of India and Maintenance for Muslim Women: Transformatory Jurisprudence
Vrinda Narain
11. Female Militancy: Reflections from Sri Lanka
Sharika Thiranagama
12. Weaponizing Women: Kashmir and the Indian military Occupation
Ather Zia
Part III Representations of Culture, Place, Identity
13. The Political Economy of Moral Regulation in Pakistan: Religion, Gender and Class in a Postcolonial Context
Saadia Toor
14. Gender, media and popular culture in a global India
Maitrayee Chaudhuri
15. Death and Friendship: Queer Archives of the Space Between
Naisargi Dave
16. Women's Place-making in Santosh Nagar: Gendered constellations
Ann Grodzins Gold
17. Vernacular Frames Queer Encounters
Navaneetha Mokil
Part IV Labor and the Economy
18. Global Governance Initiatives and Garment Sector Workers in Sri Lanka: Tracing its Gender and Development Politics
Kanchana Ruwanpura
19. An Intersection of Marxism and Feminism among India’s Informal Workers: A Second Marriage?
Rina Agarwala
20. A Feminist Commodity Chain Analysis of Rural Transformation in Contemporary India
Priti Ramamurthy
21. NGOs, State and Neoliberal Development in South Asia: The Paradigmatic Case of Bangladesh in a Global Perspective
Lamia Karim
22. Gender and Paid Domestic Work in Sri Lanka
Annemari de Silva
Part V Inequality, Activism and the State
23. The Aurat March: Women's Movements and New Feminisms in Pakistan
Shama Dossa
24. Feminism, Sexual Violence and the Times of #MeToo in India
Mary John
25. Dalit Women Between Social and Analytical Alterity: Rethinking the ‘Quintessentially Marginal’
Manuela Ciotti
26. Feminism, Sexuality and the Rhetoric of Westernization in Pakistan: Precarious Citizenship
Moon Charania
27. Mapping Women’s Activism in India: Resistances, Reforms and (Re)-Creation
Rukmini Sen
Biography
Leela Fernandes is Director and the Stanley D. Golub Chair of International Studies at the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies, University of Washington, Seattle, USA. She is the author of numerous books and essays. Her books on India include India’s New Middle Class: Democratic Politics in an Era of Economic Reform (2006), Producing Workers: The Politics of Gender, Class and Culture in the Calcutta Jute Mills (1997), and her forthcoming book, Governing Water in India: Urbanization, Inequality and the Liberalizing State (2022).