This book provides deep insights into the wide-ranging issues linked to gender, law, and social transformation in India. It focuses on women-centered laws as well as the violence of unequal and discriminatory social order. It emphasizes violence and the neutrality of laws that sustain the status quo and perpetuate the stereotypical notions related to women’s condition. Based on the first-hand experience of laws and their nuanced understanding, the essays highlight the rules associated with the private and the public domains. The chapters in the volume analyze various statutes and their enactment related to domestic violence, dowry crimes, sexual abuse at home as well as sexual harassment at the workplace, child marriages, education, property rights, trafficking, prostitution, ‘honor’ killings, and armed conflict. The book is essential to the academics and researchers in the disciplines of social sciences, gender studies, law, and the government and policy-makers for making meaningful interventions.

The pace of socioeconomic transformation in India over the past two and a half decades has been formidable. This volume sheds light on how these transformations have played out at the level of everyday life to influence the lives of Indian women, and gender relations more broadly. Through ethnographically grounded case studies, the authors portray the contradictory and contested co-existence of discrepant gendered norms, values and visions in a society caught up in wider processes of sociopolitical change. ‘Women, Gender and Everyday Social Transformation in India’ moves the debate on gender and social transformation into the domain of everyday life to arrive at locally embedded and detailed, ethnographically informed analyses of gender relations in real-life contexts that foreground both subtle and not-so-subtle negotiations and contestations.

This book comprises the proceedings of the TEQIP III Sponsored 2nd International Conference on “Gender Equity: Challenges and Opportunities” (2nd ICOGECAO 2020 -Virtual Mode), held at Sardar Vallabhbhai National Institute of Technology, Surat, Gujarat, India, from 25 to 27 November 2020. ICOGECAO provided a platform for researchers from multiple countries to present their views about the challenges associated with gender equity. Gender equity is one of the seventeen Sustainable Development Goals (SDG 5) set up by the United Nations in 2015, to promote and empower all genders equally. The proceedings strongly support the ideas of gender neutrality and blow out the mind-set of limiting gender studies to only women rights. They offer a collection of articles that break the stereotypes and myths often wrongly associated with gender. The ideas in the presented papers highlight gender-based discriminations, ask important questions and share facts that encompass beyond the so-called boundary lines. The authors contributed on various topics including but not limited to violence, crime, discrimination, and abuse against women and LGBTQ+ community. The basic motive of the presented book is to incorporate ideas and contribute to the sensitization and education about the important yet often neglected issues of gender equality. Thus, this book proves to be an essential resource for educators and researchers working in the field of gender studies. The work presents challenges caused due to COVID-19, social media, popular culture and work–life balance and explores empowerment through law, skills, technology and media. Some interesting case studies highlighted gender discrimination in science, sports and law. A variety of papers on literary texts were examined from a gender lens. The proceeding is divided into five subsections: 1. law, 2. literature, 3. management, 4. sociology and 5. social studies. The proceeding provides a wider perceptive and visuals about the scenarios which needs attention. The ideas presented will be helpful for achieving the sustainable development goal of gender equity to a greater extent.

This book examines the adequacy of laws in India as a response to sexual and gender-based violence against women. It addresses questions such as: is law doing enough in responding to violence against women in India? Where are the barriers and bottlenecks, particularly for women from marginalised communities? What can be done to ensure that justice is rendered? Based on women’s experience of violence, not solely on the basis of gender, but a combination of caste, class, and religious and gender identities, the book examines law as a response to gendered violence against women in India through the lens of intersectionality. It combines socio-legal and feminist analyses of relevant statutes on sexual and gender-based violence, their judicial interpretations, their implementation by law enforcement agencies, and their ramifications for women’s lives. This book will be of interest to academics, research scholars, and students in a range of disciplines, including law, women’s studies, gender and sexuality studies, victimology, sociology, political science, and human rights. It will also be useful for policymakers, advocates, judicial officers, paralegal workers, women’s rights campaigners, non-profit organisations and, globally, anyone interested in and concerned with justice for women in India.

The idea of writing this book has been germinating in my mind for long time but due to certain unavoidable reason could not get it finished. Really, it is very tough task to put together Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar’s ideas and thoughts on entirety in a single book, yet this book is an attempt to provide a coherent account on his socio-political struggles to establish an egalitarian transformative society with the ideas of liberty, equality, fraternity and social justice through the Constitutional means with all odds of caste indignities; and challenged the age-old social structure intellectually rooting on the ground and rendered unwavering contributions in making modern India.

By bringing together eminent scholars, this book highlights the current scholarship in the field of migration, which tries to present a counter-narrative to popular anti-immigrant rhetoric and populist domestic politics. There has been a growing global trend of alternative histories and anthropologies that brings forth the voices from the margins and the developing world. This volume, in that sense, without undermining the US's eminence, tries to deprovincialise (Burke, 2020) or deparochialise it from within or through the histories of the immigrants. In other words, it attempts to re-read the US's emergence as an important power with immigration as the site of analysis. It provides a comprehensive and in-depth theoretical and empirical discussion that will appeal to scholars and practitioners alike.

Owning Land, Being Women enquires into the processes that establish inheritance as a unique form of property relation in law and society. It focuses on India, examining the legislative processes that led to the 2005 amendment of the Hindu Succession Act 1956, along with several interconnected welfare policies. Scholars have understood these Acts as a response to growing concerns about women’s property rights in developing countries. In re-reading these Acts and exploring the wider nexus of Indian society in which the legislation was drafted, this study considers how questions of family structure and property rights contribute to the creation of legal subjects and demonstrates the significance of the politico-economic context of rights formulation. On the basis of an ethnography of a village in West Bengal, this book brings the moral axis of inheritance into sharp focus, elucidating the interwoven dynamics of bequest, distribution of family wealth and reciprocity of care work that are integral to the logic of inheritance. It explains why inheritance rights based on the notion of individual property rights are inadequate to account for practices of inheritance. Mondal shows that inheritance includes normative structures of affective attachment and expectations, i.e., evaluatively-charged imaginaries of the future that coordinate present practices. These insights pose questions of the dominant resource-based conceptualisation of inherited property in the debate on women’s empowerment. In doing so, this work opens up a line of investigation that brings feminist rights discourse into conversation with ethics, enriching the liberal theory of gender justice.

Theft, poisoning, affairs, flights home, refusals to work, eat or have sex, threats to divide the joint household, and sly acts of sabotage are some of the domestic warfare tactics employed by Muslim women attempting to resist patriarchy. Gender, Law, and Resistance in India dramatically illustrates how a patriarchal ideology is upheld and reinforced through male-governed social and legal institutions and how women defy that control. Based on anthropological fieldwork in rural Rajasthan in northern India, Erin Moore's book details the life of an extended Muslim family she has known for twenty years. In many ways the plight of the central character, Hunni, is representative of dilemmas experienced by the majority of north Indian peasant women. Ultimately an account of cultural hegemony and defiance, Gender, Law, and Resistance in India reveals how so-called "modern" state institutions and practices reinforce traditional arrangements, resulting in women being silenced, deprived of equal rights before the law, and returned to their male guardians. Still, women resist in overt and covert ways. The first ethnographic work to focus principally on the law and legal institutions of gender and agency in South Asia, this unique volume examines the interpenetrations of north India's pluralistic legal systems. Moore adeptly connects engrossing case histories to national dialogues over women's rights, discussing these issues in terms of Muslim personal laws, secularism, and communal violence. Gender, Law, and Resistance in India is a rich and truly significant contribution to gender studies, South Asian studies, and sociolegal studies.