KUMKUM SANGARI - From Myths to Markets: Essays on Gender

FROM MYrHS TO MARKETS ESSAYS ON GENDER

From Myths to Markets

Essays on Gender

edited by

KUMKUMSANGARI UMA CHAKRA V ART!

INDIAN INSTITUTE OF ADVANCED STUDY, SHIMLA MANOHAR PUBLISHERS AND DISTRIBUTORS, NEW DELHI 2001
Reprinted 2001 First Published 1999
Indian Institute of Advanced Study, 1999

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without the written permission of the publisher

Published by the Deputy Secretary Indian Institute of Advanced Study Rashtrapati Nivas, Shimla

and
Manohar Publishers and Distributors 2 / 6 , Ansari Road, Darya Ganj, Delhi
ISBN : 81 85952-60-4 (Bb)
ISBN : 81-85952-90-6 (Pb)
Typeset at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study , Shimla and printed at Print Perfect , New Delhi .
To
ALL THOSE
WHO HAVE SUPPORTED US

Preface

This book has grown out of a seminar on Women's Studies held at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study at Shimla in September 1993. It carries many of the papers presented at the seminar but for reasons of space we were unable to include all the presentations, including our own. The volume was delayed for several reasons such as waiting for revisions and attempting to bring the essays in line with the Institute's style-sheet. Eventually, to avoid further delays, we dropped the bibliography and modified the style-sheet. However, despite these modifications some of the references supplied still ' do not contain all the information required and omissions are indicated in square brackets. Needless to say all this also extended our editorial labours. We are grateful to the I.I.A.S., Professor J.S. Grewal and Professor Mrinal Miri, and especially to its publishing department and Mr. N.K. Maini for their co-operation.

Diacritical marks have been used throughout in the first four essays on ancient and medieval India but only when needed to maintain the sense of the word or phrase in subsequent essays. As a consequence, there are some variations in spelling too.

EDITORS

Contents

Preface VB Disparate Women: Transitory Contexts, Persisting
Structures IX
KUMKUM SANGARl AND UMA CHAKRAVARTI
Decentering a Patriarchal Myth: Bhisham Sahni's Madhavi 3
PANKAJ K SINGH ANDJAIDEV
The King's Household: Structure and Space in
the Sflstric Tradition 18
KUMKUMRoy
Women and the 'Domestic' in Tamil Folk Songs
VUAYA RAMAsWAMY 39
Divine Family and World Maintenance:
GaI}.esa in the Bengal Puranas
KUNAL CHAKRABARTI 56
II
A Book of Her Own. A Life of Her Own:
Autobiography of a Nineteenth-century Women
T ANIKA SARKAR 85
Realities and Reflections: Personal Narratives of two
Women from Nineteenth-century Maharashtra
MEERA KOSAMBI 125
Women's Education in the Madras Presidency:
Issues of Class and Patriarchy
PADMINI SWAMI NATHAN 161
Gender and the Logic of Brahminism: Periyar and the Politics of the Female Body
V. GEETHA 198

x Contents
III

Transitory Residents, Invisible Workers: Rethinking
Locality and Incorporation in a Rajasthan Village
RAJNI PALRIWALA 237
Ideology, Culture and Hierarchy: Expenditure
Consumption Patterns in Rural Households
PREM CHOWDHRY 274
Gender in Neo-Classical Economics:
A Conceptual Overview
RITU DEWAN 312
Analysing Women's Work Under Patriarchy
NIRMALA BANERJEE 321
IV Patriarchy and State Systems in North-East India: A
Historical and Critical Perspective 341
MARNA MAHANTA
Women's Empowerment: Paradigms and Paradoxes
JASODHARA BACCHI 368
Interrogating Psychology: Some Feminist Issues
and Implications 380
U. VINDHYA
Notes on Contributors 395

Disparate Women: Transitory Contexts, Persistent Structures

KUMKUM SANGARI and UMA CHAKRAVARTI

The two organising terms of our title - persistence and disparityindicate both our unease with and aspiration for feminist writing. And both require some elaboration. Feminist writing is notable for the extent to which it has challenged other disciplines and opened new ways of questioning and interpreting social life. However, we feel it is also important to need to keep in mind the extent to which it has drawn, often usefully, from other theoretical systems and how much it remains mortgaged to these systems in ways that may in fact be obstructive, prevent contextual rethinking, or allow it to rest in tired terrains.

The institutionalisation of women's studies in the past two decades has, paradoxically, assisted the proliferation of work on gender questions but produced an inexplicable inertia about systematic and wide ranging reinterpretations of the history, literature, culture, family forms, labour and social formations of the subcontinent. That is, work which on account of its scale and density required collective labour, co-ordination and institutional infrastructures, and which by its very nature was beyond the capacities of individual women, many of whom have spent these very yearsjugglingjobs, research, activism and family lives.

Thus even after two decades of institutionalisation, it is still difficult to draw either a spatial or a temporal map of patriarchal structures on the subcontinent. There are neither overarching studies that have tried to disaggregate different patriarchal systems and explain the persistence of patriarchal structures, nor systematic regional and period-based studies that have established the unevenness or relative importance of such structures at different levels. Although connections are often implied and can be elicited from individual studies, they are seldom articulated. The complexity of patriarchal structures as ideological, economic, cultural, and as interdependent with other areas of social life - is acknowledged, but few works bring this out in its fullness. Further, contemporary empirical studies, though often interdisciplinary and very rich, are usually too narrowly focussed

xii KUMKUM SANGARI and UMA CHAKRAVARTI

to isolate larger patterns. For instance, despite many studies on women's education it is still difficult to make comparisons, connections and distinctions between women who entered colonial education at different class levels and in different regions. Though there is plenty of localised evidence of unevenness - in the hostility to education , women's own stake in literacy even within the same household or class as well as of the gap between what their education was designed for and the way in which women used it, no countrywide patterns have emerged. Nor has the relationship between women's literacy and the presence or absence of social and political movements as leading to or impeding wider transformations been explored adequately. Despite regional indications of the colonial state's readiness to live up to 'local' sentiments regarding a religionbased and limited education for women as well as to create or reinforce caste and 'community' prejudices, a wider profile of its commitment to class and gender inequality has yet to emerge.