Angana Chatterji - Contesting Nation: Gendered Violence in South Asia: Notes on the Postcolonial Present

Engendering Violence: Boundaries, Histories, and the Everyday
Sukanya Banerjee, Angana P. Chatterji, Lubna Nazir Chaudhry, Manali Desai, Saadia Toor

1. 
   Women's Agency in War and Post-Conflict Sri Lanka
   Darini Rajasingham-Senanayake
   
2. 
   Gender, Citizenship and Visual Culture
   Usha Zacharias
   
3. 
   Radicalizing Gendered Narratives
   Rita Manchanda
   
4. 
   Sodomy, Civil Liberties, and the Indian Penal Code
   Jyoti Puri
   
5. 
   Stranded at the Intersection of Local and Global Patriarchies
   Huma Ahmed-Ghosh
   
6. 
   The Structure and Transformation of Gendered Violence in Bangladesh
   Meghna Guhathakurta
   
7. 
   Mohajir Women Survivors and Structural Violence
   Lubna Nazir Chaudhry
   
8. 
   Communalism and Sexual Violence in Gujarat
   Kavita Panjabi
   
9. 
   State, NGOs and Militant Islam
   Lamia Karim
   
10. 
    The Negotiation of Divorce and Violence in Plural Legal Settings in Kolkata
    Srimati Basu
    
11. 
    Negation of 'Kashmiriyat' and Immiseration of the Kashmiri Woman
    Nyla Ali Khan
    
12. 
    The Biopolitics of Hindu Nationalism
    Angana P. Chatterji
    

An intellectual and political obligation to speak to structural and personal inequities, borders and margins, nation and gender, and speech/silence has shaped this collection. The essays elaborate on a myriad of issues that bind South Asia in the historical present. As institutions of state and majoritarian and heteronormative nation-making fracture and frame cultural and political community, how are these processes productive of social violence in general, and gendered violence in particular?

We are privileged that this collection includes the work of feminists who are diverse in history and heritage, scholarship and disciplinary affiliations, acutely aware that collaborations on South Asia are often dominated by scholarship of India. Situated in South Asia and in the diaspora, these women bring powerful and varied experiences and insights to questions of violence, nation and nationalisms, rights, justice and resistance across issues of gender and ethnicity, class and identity, and community and culture in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India, Kashmir, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka.

The friendships and solidarities that emerged through this process are precious and we hope will endure. Our collaboration permitted thinking the shared and divergent histories that shape us, and differing legacies of nation. We remain grateful to the contributors; Huma Ahmed-Ghosh, Srimati Basu, Meghna Guhathakurta, Lamia Karim, Nyla Ali Khan, Rita Manchanda, Kavita Panjabi, Jyoti Puri, Darini Rajasingham- Senanayake, Usha Zacharias, for the care and commitment that produced this scholarship. To Sukanya Banerjee, Manali Desai, Saadia Toor, our heartfelt thanks for shaping the introduction, and to Kamala Visweswaran, for her generous contributions in enabling the process and the first version of this volume (see below). Working with each one of you has been an invitation to learn and be challenged. Shefali Chandra, Meenakshi Ganguly, Saba Gul Khattak, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Sujata Moorti, Nimanthi Rajasingham, Yasmin Saikia, thank you for your thoughtful and astute counsel. We owe a great debt to Richard Shapiro for his alliance, advice and intellect. We are obliged to Rajib Akhter for diligent and caring support. We sincerely appreciate the editorial assistance offered by Annie Paradise and Mia Houtermans. We thank Pei Wu for her help with research checks and Heidi Andra Restrepo Rhodes for assistance with proof-reading. To Shweta Vachani, Preeti Gill and other colleagues at Zubaan, thank you for your expertise and labour. Most of all, our warmest thanks to Urvashi Butalia, whose formidable work and solidarity made this publication possible.

The essays in this collection were written between 2004 and 2007. Much has transpired since, across South Asia and elsewhere. We embarked on this project through the 32nd South Asia Conference at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2003, where a few of us convened a pre-conference on Gender, Violence and Community. Our exchanges facilitated complex reflections on our work as feminists immersed in scholarship-activism on South Asia and its diasporas. Following the pre-conference, Kamala Visweswaran offered an invitation to assemble a double issue for Cultural Dynamics, of which she was the North American Editor. We are thankful to her, to Guha Sankar, Fern Bryant, Janet Defreitas, Catherine Gibbons, and others at Cultural Dynamics for making possible that publication, which appeared in October 2004. We thank Sage Publications, especially Huw Alexander, for permission to reproduce the material published in Cultural Dynamics. This book is an amplification of that endeavour. An iteration of the collectively-authored introduction and articles authored by Angana P. Chatterji, Lubna Nazir Chaudhry, Meghna Guhathakurta, Lamia Karim, Rita Manchanda, Darini Rajasingham-Senanayake and Usha Zacharias were first published in Cultural Dynamics (2004, 16[2/3]: 31972). In addition, Srimati Basus article first appeared in Playing Off Courts: The Negotiation of Divorce and Violence in Plural Legal Settings in Kolkata, India (Journal of Legal Pluralism and Unofficial Law, 2007, 52: 4175). Nyla Khans article first appeared in The Land of Lalla-Ded: Politicization of Kashmir and Construction of the Kashmiri Woman (Journal of International Womens Studies, 2007, 9[1]: 2241).

We remain hopeful that histories, both violent and kind, can allow transformations and can power our becoming amid hybrid and non-normalizing worlds, in-between here and there, at home and in homelessness. We offer this, accepting that even as the concerns raised here are critical, too much is left unsaid.

Angana P. Chatterji and Lubna Nazir Chaudhry
April 2012