11sreenivasan

S TAT E OF THE F IELD
Ramya Sreenivasan
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The Diversity of Women’s Studies
and Women’s Histories
Reflections from South Asia
Abstract: This review article is a state of the field review, based on six recent
monographs and edited volumes published in the United States, India,
and England, all pertaining to women’s studies or women’s history
in South Asia.
Krupa Shandilya, Intimate Relations: Social Reform and the Late Nineteenth-Century South
Asian Novel, Flashpoints series, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2017
Vanita Reddy, Fashioning Diaspora: Beauty, Femininity, and South Asian American Culture,
Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2016
Marian Aguiar, Arranging Marriage: Conjugal Agency in the South Asian Diaspora, Minneap-
olis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018
Sonja Thomas, Privileged Minorities: Syrian Christianity, Gender, and Minority Rights in Post-
colonial India, Global South Asia series, Seattle: University of Washington Press,
2018
Afiya S. Zia, Faith and Feminism in Pakistan: Religious Agency or Secular Autonomy? Brighton:
Sussex Academic Press, 2018
Maitreyee Mukhopadhyay, ed., Feminist Subversion and Complicity: Governmentalities and
Gender Knowledge in South Asia, New Delhi: Zubaan Books, 2016
These six books—five monographs and one edited volume—represent

the diversity of women’s studies as a field. They belong to different fields—
literature, cultural studies, history, development studies—and draw on
different kinds of archives and evidence. Two of the books reviewed here
belong in the field of diaspora studies, including one in the field of Asian
American studies. All of them engage, in more or less explicit ways, with
meridians feminism, race, transnationalism 20:1 April 2021

doi: 10.1215/15366936-8913085 © 2021 Smith College
12 meridians 20:1 April 2021
the present sociopolitical moment, whether in North America or in the

United Kingdom or in the nation-states of South Asia. A word about my
own location: I am an historian of early modern India, with interests in
social and cultural history, memory, as well as women’s history. I study
long-term transitions in South Asian history, particularly across the

precolonial-colonial divide. Taken together, the books reviewed here
indicate the intellectual diversity of women’s studies as it has evolved
in different institutional locations—in North America, in the United
Kingdom, and within South Asia. As such, however, they also point to
some of the structural issues confronting the field, including potentially
incommensurable methods and inferences. This essay reviews the six
titles in sequence, before considering the questions they raise for the field
and for programs in women’s studies.
In Intimate Relations: Social Reform and the Late Nineteenth-Century South Asian
Novel, Krupa Shandilya seeks to recover “dissident subjectivities” (4) for
Indian women in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in a
broader historical context of colonial British critique and indigenous
South Asian social reform. Through a close reading of lesser-known novels
by some of the most significant novelists writing in Bengali (Bankimchan-
dra Chatterjee, Rabindranath Tagore, and Saratchandra Chatterjee) and
in Urdu (Nazir Ahmad, Hali, and Mirza Hadi Ruswa) at the turn of the
twentieth century, Shandilya argues that the women characters in their
novels “exceed[ed] the ostensible agenda of reforming women to make
them signifiers of the spiritual, asexual, and therefore apolitical South
Asian nation.” Her aims are more ambitious than this, however: she seeks
to trace “a different genealogy of modernity” for a decolonized “feminist
project”—“one that combines the erotic and the spiritual as articulated
in the colonial Bengali novel” (58).
Shandilya points out the contradictions in authors like Bankimchandra
and Rabindranath, whose novels, though written “ostensibly . . . to pro-
mote widow remarriage . . . conclude with the social ostracism and death
of the widow protagonist and ultimately contribute to hegemonic ideas
of the impossibility of widow remarriage” (24). Even in such overdeter-
mined narratives, however, Shandilya shows how it is possible for the
reader to glean traces of the widow’s subjectivity as “desiring subject,”
produced through the intersection of the moral codes of Bengal—
Vaishnava devotional traditions and the ideology of normative wifehood,
sati—and “the desires of her body.” The amalgam then is an articulation
Ramya Sreenivasan The Diversity of Women’s Studies and Women’s Histories 13
of “sexual-spiritual desires . . . expressed through . . . wifely devotion,

which becomes a means of radical agency for the widow but is necessarily
circumscribed by the mores of her society” (24).
In the novels of Saratchandra, widely celebrated by women readers in
his own lifetime for his sensitivity to their concerns, Shandilya reads the

full elaboration of such desire, especially of the intertwining of “the erotic
and the devotional.” She argues that the idea of love upheld in Saratch-
andra’s Final Question (1931) combines the spiritual with the sexual; in the
words of the old patriarch in the novel, “conjugal affection is only one facet
of a woman’s love. It comprises an intense desire to give oneself away
despite all hurdles, all sufferings.” Shandilya invokes Talal Asad here to
counter a modern reader who might see this as reaffirming the oldest
patriarchal assumption about a woman’s self-realization being defined as
vested in devotion to a man. Instead, she argues that Saratchandra was
invoking norms from beyond a liberal framework, norms drawn from
Vaishnava devotionalism: of “the surrender of the self in erotic devotion
to a lover” as “a means of self-realization.” Within this logic of selfhood
redefined, self-realization is cast as a goal beyond marriage. As the pro-
tagonist Kamal explains at the end of the novel, “Marriage is one event
in life out of many—no more.” Shandilya sees Kamal, and through her
the narrator and author, as suggesting that intimacy, or the “sex-love
connection[,] is only a path toward a spiritual grounded realization
of the self—it is not in itself a form of self-realization” (50).
If colonial Bengali novels thus presented depictions of widowed pro-
tagonists that were shot through with contradictions, Shandilya reads
colonial-era Urdu novels as shot through with their own contradictions on
some of the most contested aspects of Muslim social life and politics at
that historical moment: on the status of women, and on the formation of a
modern Urdu literary culture that would be superior to the courtly and
aristocratic salon poetry that it was seeking to replace. She argues that the
novels “fail to forward a coherent reformist agenda because of their vexed
relation to literary modes and, consequently, to reform” (61–62). That is,
she argues that these novels failed to condemn the poet and “to put forward
a reformed Urdu literary culture.” Furthermore, the depiction of “the edu-
cated, modern, Muslim woman—both the courtesan and the respectable
women in purdah” was equally “rife with contradictions” (62).
Key to Shandilya’s argument here is her reading of prominent Urdu
novelist Nazir Ahmed’s Bride’s Mirror (1869), especially of its protagonist,
the virtuous and efficient Asghari. On the one hand, Asghari is educated,
especially in arithmetic and in crafts like sewing and embroidery, and
these skills enable her to run her household with great thrift and efficiency.
She is also able to teach lessons to Muslim girls and uses the connections
from her network of students to arrange a favorable, hypergamous mar-

riage for her sister-in-law. And she does all of this while observing purdah
and being a devout and observant Muslim woman. Shandilya argues that
at a historical moment when “the meaning of purdah and the zenana was
being debated,” these were being depicted in the novel as “spaces that
make possible particularly feminine modes of agency” (72). Equally
fraught, in Shandilya’s opinion, is the depiction of the most famous
courtesan in Urdu literature, Mirza Hadi Ruswa’s Umrao Jan. Shandilya
thus sees a contradiction between her being an accomplished courtesan,
“a cultured and educated woman, well versed in the art of poetry and
flirtation,” but equally “a modesty-desiring subject who decries her pro-
fession and occasionally laments her fate” (80).
As Shandilya sums up her own argument, it is such “inchoate desires
that emanate from the subject—the sexual desires of the widow, the veiled
woman’s desire for power, and the courtesan’s for modesty—which
become the terrain of ideological contestation for the male reformers and
simultaneously the means by which the women are able to reformulate that
which forms them” (102). Invoking feminist theorizations of the personal
as political, wherein “acts of agency within the home are not political
merely because they reflect on larger national political processes . . . but
because they engage with the self and its desires,” Shandilya argues ulti-
mately that these colonial-era Urdu and Bengali novels can point in the
direction of “an alternative feminist conception of nationalist modernity in
which the self ’s erotic-religious desires are always already political” (103).
Shandilya’s monograph has been published in the Flashpoints series
by Northwestern University Press, devoted to books “distinguished both
by their historical grounding and by their theoretical and conceptual
strength” (inside cover). The series is also directed at “a broad audience
within the humanities and the social sciences concerned with moments
of cultural emergence and transformation.” Intimate Relations has clearly
been written with an eye to this broader audience, unfamiliar with South
Asian languages, histories, and literary histories. In the very ambition to
reach a broader audience, both the author and the series editors deserve
kudos. And yet, at least for this reviewer, the breadth of address comes at
the expense of depth of understanding: of social histories, literary fields,

semantic fields, and of formations of genre. Attention to such questions
would have produced a somewhat different book with a longer bibliogra-
phy. For one, virtually all of Shandilya’s key terms—love, desire (Sanskrit
kama, Persian ‘ishq), spiritual, erotic—are keywords in Raymond Williams’s

sense of the term. These are concepts with dense semantic and semiotic
fields, and a philological attention to their use in various contexts and
genres, and over time, would yield its own social and intellectual histories.
The scholarship on each of these terms is voluminous. And yet Intimate
Relations uses the terms in their flattened English translations, without
invoking the cultural-historical worlds attached to them. We do not get a
sense of the vocabulary used in the Bengali and Urdu novels for either the
erotic or the spiritual, in the context of desire. Nor do we get citations of the
most helpful scholarship in this context (Orsini 2007).1 This lacuna means
that we do not get a sense of the internal texture of the novels discussed
here—to what extent they were engaging in articulating affirmation of, or
dissent against, key traditions, practices, and concepts. Shandilya does
justice to the scholarship on the individual novelists and authors whose
works are explored here. Those authors were located in fields of literary
production, however, that were multilingual. Intimate Relations is able to
show us how Saratchandra read John Stuart Mill on women’s rights and
argued with him, but it is unable to tell us which other South Asian lan-
guages he was familiar with, in an era when most novelists knew at least
one other South Asian language. Again, as with keywords, also missing
are citations to the comparative scholarship on the history of this field of
literary production within colonial-era South Asia (Chatterjee 1995; Black-
burn and Dalmia 2004; Mir 2010). The other key lacuna here is an under-
standing of the social context of these novels. While influential intellectual
histories of reform in colonial South Asia are cited, such as the relevant
works by Partha Chatterjee or Faisal Devji, what is missing is any sense
of a social context in which novelists and novels were making meaning,
taking stances, contesting practices.2 After all, the novel has been the
genre, in a global literary history, that has been most associated with
precisely these attributes, in its very form, as it were. The cumulative con-
sequence of these lacunae is that Intimate Relations asserts what these par-
ticular novels and novelists were setting out to do, without explaining
how or why.
Vanita Reddy’s Fashioning Diaspora: Beauty, Femininity, and South Asian
American Culture traces “how transnational itineraries of Indian beauty and

fashion shape South Asian American cultural identities and racialized
belonging,” between 1990 and 2010 (5). Reddy sees these decades as
marked by three key historical events: first, the liberalization of India’s
economy in 1991, and the increasing availability of US popular culture in

Indian markets; second, the Indian government’s courting of elite, non-
resident Indians living and working in the United States; and third, the
geopolitical moment “post-9/11,” which Reddy argues generated new alle-
giances that required “the exclusion of Muslim populations from both US
and Indian global modernities” (5). In this historical context, Fashioning
Diaspora adopts transnational feminist critique to examine “beauty’s force
at the level of bodily intensities, capacities, and propensities as it circulates
across various diaspora cultural texts” (5). Reddy provides useful defini-
tions for beauty and for fashion. Beauty here refers to “a mode of aesthetic
judgment and a diasporic mode of embodiment . . . sometimes with the
goal of producing aesthetic pleasure; and a style or performance of racial-
ized femininity” (6). And by fashion she means “both the creative input
and economic processes that are required to translate the raw material of
clothing into the symbolic meaning of style (fashionability) and the habits
of dress and attire that inform everyday practices of self and identity
(sartoriality)” (7). It is in beauty as produced by “social structures and
socializing capacities . . . within diaspora cultural production” that Reddy
is primarily interested, and by this definition, the term beauty “encom-
passes a range of material expressions including fashion” (8). Further-
more, given the strong connection between beauty and feminine subjects,
she argues for comprehending “diasporic Indian femininity as the gendered
territory of beauty” (9). However, the idea of Indian beauty as “a practice
of diasporic articulation . . . operates on a diverse range of bodies and
subjects.” As a practice, therefore, beauty “produces multiple spatial scales
of social belonging, affiliations across multiple forms of difference, and
multiple forms of embodiment that are not reducible to a single kind
of diasporic subject or a unified way of imagining diaspora” (13).
It is here that the heart of the argument of this book lies: rather than
assume “identity as a representational politics” to analyze South Asian
American cultural forms, Reddy chooses to “showcase what affiliations,
intimacies, and embodiments emerge when we prioritize Indian beauty
as a material and affective force” (18). She argues that the most illuminat-
ing way to explore these questions is by conceptualizing beauty as an
“assemblage,” invoking Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Understanding

beauty as such an assemblage allows her then to move away from an ideo-
logical critique of the Indian fashion and beauty industries, toward ques-
tions of “where and how beauty organizes and constellates various social
actors within its material force” (19).

Reddy argues that there is another set of interpretive insights to be
gained from theorizing beauty as assemblage. She sees the adoption of
such a perspective as enabling her “to track beauty’s limits . . . the places
or moments in which it fails to materialize as a mode of embodiment, per-
formance, practice, or attribute.” And, she continues, we should see these
failures as “politically and socially productive” (26). She elaborates two
ways in which failures of embodiment are productive. First, such failures
“offer a political critique, however implicitly, of the links between beauty
as a gendered regime of bodily discipline and the instrumentalization of
these regimes of disciplinarity for driving a global capitalist economy” (26).
And second, “such feelings of failure become the conditions of possibility
for diaspora affiliations across class lines that in turn produce an alterna-
tive scene of beauty and pageantry” (27). An attention to such moments of
failure, to such traces as it were, can help comprehend beauty “as a deeply,
if unevenly, socializing force,” instead of seeing it as “commodities that
secure self-advantage or social privilege or as a mode of bodily discipline
and regimentation that generates ever greater forms of autonomy” (27).
To grasp “these difficult-to-capture habitations of beauty,” then, she
also suggests “a slowing down of our reading practices” (19). Hence each
chapter of the book is deliberately focused on “a single text, author, or
sometimes genre of cultural production in order to capture the magni-
tudes, intensities, scales, and durations of beauty’s force” (20). In making
such choices of conceptual vocabulary, analytical tools, as well as evidence
such as literature, visual media, and performance art, Reddy explicitly
departs from sociological studies of fashion and beauty. The latter, she
suggests, regard beauty as an “empirically observable part of everyday life
imbued with racial meaning.” In contrast, Fashioning Diaspora sees beauty
as “structuring racial formation and diasporic sensibilities in ways that
may elude capture within the ‘ethnographic field’”—hence the attention
to literary, visual, and theatrically performed “engagements with beauty”
(23). To state this differently: Reddy is interested in tracking “beauty’s
capacity to captivate, its force as a set of affective fields or ‘territories of
feeling’ within the consumer spaces of contemporary capitalism” (27).
And, she argues, it is cultural texts and objects that offer the most produc-
tive evidence of such affective relationships, even if only in traces to be
recovered by a skilled interpreter.
Chapter 1 examines the nature of the eponymous protagonist’s beauty
in Bharati Mukherjee’s novel Jasmine (1989); this is a physical attractiveness

that repeatedly reveals both the potential and the failures of national and
transnational belonging for diasporic Indian women. Chapter 2 shifts the
focus to Jhumpa Lahiri’s collection of short stories, Interpreter of Maladies
(1999). Here, according to Reddy, feminine beauty both incites and thwarts
desires for transnational mobility and belonging, even as Lahiri remains
equally skeptical of national attachments. Chapter 3 moves to considering
Indian female beauty as expressed in performances and consumer prac-
tices among diasporic female youth, including the marketing of the Indian
American Girl doll, Neela Sen.
Chapters 4 and 5 discuss visual and performance art that mobilizes
South Asian fashions—the bindi and the sari—to generate what Reddy sees
as distinctly feminist modes of embodiment. In contrast to the texts and
practices explored in the first three chapters, chapters 4 and 5 deal with
performance art and visual art that explicitly deploy parody as a strategy
to provoke critical distance and questioning through subversion. Thus
Swati Khurana’s video Dothead (2001) and Prema Murthy’s fake porno-
graphic website Bindigirl (1999), both experimental in nature, aspire to
produce, according to Reddy, “oppositional visual economies of fashion”
(141). Both works use “parody’s postmodern associations with culturally
degraded versions of high culture” (141), to provoke conversations in the
audience about cultural appropriation and its “variegated” nature on the
one hand (143), and real, material violence on the other (such as the race
baiting of bindi-wearing, South Asian immigrant women in the 1980s).
Throughout the book, Reddy identifies the “intimacies, affiliations, and
embodiments” that the explorations of beauty in these texts enable: espe-
cially those that are disruptive, such as “transclass, cross-gender, inter-
racial, cross-generational, and nonheteronormative attachments” (33).
Reddy is a skilled interpreter and writes lucidly. She presents subtle and
persuasive readings of literary, visual, and performance works. The meth-
odological emphasis on literary and artistic interpretation, however,
brings its own limitations. For one, we are left with unexplored questions
about the specifics of reception, as difficult as those might be to identify in
the archive. One wonders, though, whether the texts that Reddy reads offer
some pointers as to intended readers, or target readers. One also wishes
that there had been more of an attempt to engage with questions of how
these texts circulate and in what contexts. Without such questions, the
dissident readings that Reddy teases out from these texts remain fleeting,

exclusively textual traces. At another level, beauty and fashion are marked
within South Asia by their region of origin and may also be differentiated by
caste and by religious community. One wonders about such regional and
community markers of fashion and beauty among South Asian immigrants
in North America. To what extent do they retain such markers of ethnic
differentiation from within South Asia, and in what social contexts? If such
regional markers disappear in the diaspora, to what extent is that a con-
scious forging of a diasporic national identity that erases such difference,
and which norms and aesthetics are being valorized? For the authors and
artists of the texts that Reddy focuses on, the question in particular is, to
what extent do they explore, or obscure, such questions that virtually every
South Asian consumer of these texts would ask? And how would we explain
such absences where they might occur? To contend with these would
require an awareness of the messy sociohistorical realities that diasporic
aesthetic practices of fashion and beauty mediate.3
In Arranging Marriage: Conjugal Agency in the South Asian Diaspora, Marian
Aguiar seeks to explore “what is achieved personally, politically, or
socially” by arranged marriage in the South Asian diaspora, even as she
acknowledges that the practice has “historically sometimes led to the
denial of personal freedom” (xi). And she does so explicitly through the
“interpretation of narrative responses to arranged marriages” (xii). She
points out that, while it is difficult to assess the numbers of arranged mar-
riages in the diaspora, discourses about the practice “have multiplied and
taken on significant roles, and done so globally” (3). Instead of considering
whether the prevalence of the practice mitigates against “expectations of
assimilation,” Aguiar suggests that second-generation Indians, Pakista-
nis, and Bangladeshis in the United States and Britain “are engaged in a
dialogue about conjugal forms,” one that cuts “across class lines” (4).
She argues that these transnational discourses about arranged marriage
show how conjugal practices have become “first, ciphers for belonging
in national contexts that are increasingly permeated by flows of people,
practices, labor, capital, and ideas across borders and, second, a means
for constructing those global networks” (4). The book is thus about the
reinvention of arranged marriage “as an emblematic practice” within

the South Asian diaspora, in the contexts of Britain, the United States,
and Canada.
Aguiar points to the malleability of arranged marriage as a practice
among sections of the diaspora, with the introduction of new elements

such as dating. She also points out how, in much public discourse,
arranged marriage is contrasted with “love marriage.” The book suggests
an alternative taxonomy for both sets of practices, as a way of escaping
contrasts that, Aguiar suggests, are ultimately reductive. So she argues that
the term arranged invokes an imagined subject, “the subject of agency, the
subjectivity that marks decision making” (5). And she prefers the term
self-made to better describe the set of practices otherwise known as “love
marriage” (7).
Chapter 1 traces a genealogy for the present that is rooted in debates
about conjugality originating in colonial India, in the context of concerns
about family and community. She points out how “conjugal practices
[emerged] as a disciplinary site for constituting notions of modernity in
postcolonial India.” New laws, such as the Special Marriages Act of 1954
and the Hindu Marriage Act of 1955, attempted to shift power from the
community to the state, notwithstanding their rhetoric of the uplift of
women. The powerful role of community persisted, however. Thus “conju-
gal reform became a place to see this disjunction between law and the
practice of local communities” (49). An Islamization campaign in Pakistan
in the 1980s, and the persistence of a personal law oriented to the sharia
that governed marriage in independent Bangladesh, have generated com-
parable dynamics. Aguiar suggests decisive shifts in the present, diasporic
moment, however: “A set of conjugal discourses that push to the fore a
notion of community inscribes the concept of arranged marriage and its
accompanying social formations through the idea of culture” (52). Conse-
quently, South Asian marriage in the diaspora “continues to be the site for
the articulation of cultural nationalism”—arranged marriage is reinter-
preted and, Aguiar would argue, reinvigorated “as an oppositional symbol
that coheres the collective against the global force of Westernization” (52).
Some of Aguiar’s most interesting observations pertain to second-
generation immigrants. She cites ethnographic studies of how South Asian
youths in Silicon Valley “reproduce social structures with an eye toward
investing in the future communities to which they aspire to belong” (54).
At the same time, membership within the community is also reinforced
through the policing of social behavior, and because of the emotional and
logistical costs of exiting the community (55). Among a different segment
of the diaspora, a transnational class of Indian information technology
workers, narratives of home and family are rewritten “such that they are
compatible with the geographic mobility of a global economy.” Among

mobile subjects in a transnational context, “the formulation of community
is limited to culture. The ideal of individualism is maintained in the neo-
liberal rhetoric of choosing to express cultural identity” (63). For differing
reasons then, both segments of this diaspora rely on culturalist interpre-
tations of arranged marriage, ignoring its material and political aspects.
Chapters 2 and 3 pertain to the discourse generated in contemporary
Britain around the question of force in arranged marriage. Key to Aguiar’s
discussion here is her critique of the workings of multiculturalism in
Britain. On the one hand, “multicultural discourses ostensibly give equal
credence to different conjugal practices that locate decision making in
individual or collective hands. However, these same discourses seek to
draw absolute boundaries related to personal freedom” (67). Aguiar shows
how this discourse centers on consent as the primary means of distin-
guishing between arranged marriages and forced marriages. The law has
expanded its understanding of duress in such contexts, “to account for
psychological and emotional forces that overbear will.” Legal, bureau-
cratic, and media discourses all converge around constructing a consent-
ing subject. Aguiar points out, however, that the very concept of arranged
marriage “challenges contemporary British norms of marital consent by
inserting either alternate or multiple subjects into conjugal decision mak-
ing” (73). Moreover, in the South Asian diaspora in Britain, marriage also
serves as a path to residence and, potentially, citizenship under immigra-
tion law. Thus marriage is not only a “paradigm” but also a “means for
national belonging” (83). Aguiar also cites feminist legal scholars Sundari
Anitha and Aisha Gill to suggest that “the agent of decision making is
contextual and conjunctural, constituted in interaction with competing
hegemonies” (85). And she argues that it is literary and cinematic texts
that elaborate “these structural and affective factors and the production
of this mediated subject” (85). Exit from forced marriage can be resolved
in this discourse only through exit from the community. Aguiar sees such
exit as necessary in individual instances of violence and forced marriage.
However, she is wary of the ways in which such discourse sets up the idea
of the state as a surrogate parent, and wary of setting the state above the
community. She shows how Nadeem Aslam’s 2004 novel, Maps for Lost
Lovers, attempts to recast the values of the community from within. The
novel locates shame and honor as emerging from “the economic exigencies
of transnational labor and global economies” (46), so that in the first
instance, violence is not an expression of the pure culture of the homeland;

and, in the second instance, forced marriage is not primarily a problem
of culture, as the state would prefer to see it.
Chapter 4 moves to consider the diasporic context in the United States
and Canada and explores various perspectives on arranged marriage
among South Asian immigrants who arrived after 1965 (1967 in Canada).
In the United States, Aguiar cites Nancy Cott to remind us that debates on
arranged marriage dated back to the late nineteenth century and were
salient in the twin contexts of immigration law as well as the assimilation
(or not) of immigrants. Thus, in the Immigrant Act of 1917, arranged mar-
riage “in which overt economic bargaining and kinship networks beyond
the marrying pair played acknowledged parts” (Cott 149), “were deemed a
form of prostitution” (Aguiar 147–48). In short, conjugal practices became
the focus of intense debate and legislation pertaining to sanctioned ways
of being American. This logic was mirrored, as it were, in the perspective
of South Asians who arrived in the United States in the sixties. For them,
arranged marriage was to be celebrated as a way to “be” Indian or Pakistani
or Bangladeshi. By the seventies and eighties, though, liberal feminists,
both South Asian and non–South Asian, saw the practice as inimical to
women’s agency (154). Once again, as in her discussion of Aslam’s novel,
Aguiar invokes fiction as exploring a more complex dynamic in which
marriage offers women the room for negotiation and mobility. She persists
with reading fiction to suggest that a second generation in the South Asian
diaspora works within the boundaries of arranged marriage, rather than
rejecting the practice wholesale. Chapter 5 considers the new, postfemi-
nist, popular culture circulating in both South Asia and the diaspora,
within a global, English-reading public. Aguiar argues that this popular
culture “affectively” mobilizes people “toward . . . community affiliations,
while allowing them to invest in individual agency” (35). In the process,
a new idea of “tradition” emerges, one that is not coercive but “freely
chosen” by individuals, both men and women, who are mobile, typically
middle-class or elite subjects, in a global, transnational economy.
This is a lucidly argued book and will stimulate fruitful debate in under-
graduate and graduate classrooms. Aguiar uses discourse analysis as a
strategy to interpret legal debates, media reports, mass market memoirs,

and works of fiction, as they engage in discussions of arranged marriage
and its variants among the South Asian diaspora in the United Kingdom,
Canada, and the United States. As a historian of kinship and households
in early modern India, I found the bibliography useful in identifying

key debates around marriage practices and their legal regulation in the
present moment. Aguiar is also skillful in triangulating different genres
of discourse—say, media reports, government policy documents, and
novels—against each other, to outline the contours of particular debates,
and the range of positions within them taken by various actors. This is
especially true of her account of the debates in the United Kingdom over
the last three decades or more. If there is a lacuna here, it is that one would
have wished for a more explicit reckoning of how genre and its conventions
might mediate discussions of community, practice, and its regulation.
Like Reddy’s Fashioning Diaspora, Aguiar’s Arranging Marriage also leaves
unexplored the issue of how diasporic practices might relate to the prac-
tices of communities of origin within South Asia. This may be especially
pertinent because of the variability of marriage practices by religious com-
munity, class, caste, and educational attainment within South Asia. As
with Reddy’s work, the question here for Aguiar is, to what extent do par-
ticular immigrant communities themselves, as well as the regulatory state,
acknowledge or transcend or ignore such stark differences in practice
within South Asia, as it might shape practices in the diaspora? What is the
basic unit of analysis in state definitions of multiculturalism? Is it defined
by nationality of origin? If so, what is the relationship between this legisla-
tive and regulatory flattening out of diversity from the home country, and
impulses toward a similar flattening out (or their converse, for that mat-
ter), among immigrant communities themselves? And, to what extent are
diasporic communities, across generations, attuned to contests around
marriage, divorce, inheritance, and the guardianship of minors within
contemporary South Asia?4
Sonja Thomas’s Privileged Minorities: Syrian Christianity, Gender, and Minority
Rights in Postcolonial India demonstrates the salience of these questions
about gender and community from within the context of the southwestern
Indian state of Kerala, long heralded in the development studies literature
as a model of successful policy initiatives with regard to gender and liter-
acy. That is to say, Thomas’s book about the refashioning of the prosperous
Syrian Christian community in postcolonial India raises questions about
the self-fashioning of various diasporic communities that are pertinent for

the communities that Reddy and Aguiar study. Privileged Minorities frames
its study of Syrian Christians within the context of debates about secular-
ism in contemporary India or, more accurately, about the socioeconomic
and political consequences of legal recognition by the Indian state, as a

religious minority. Of particular interest to Thomas is the place of Syrian
Christian women in these debates: both the political positions that the
women themselves hold, and their material and symbolic place as it is
renegotiated within the modern, postcolonial community. As is the case
more broadly for modern India, Thomas argues that in Kerala too, “a nor-
mative ‘dominant woman’ paradigm has emerged that privileges upper-
caste and middle-class experiences over and against other expressions
of womanhood mediated by caste, class, race, and religion” (6).
Privileged Minorities begins with a short but useful sketch of the commu-
nity’s origins and its history, perforce relying on community traditions and
memory for the earlier centuries (given the absence of relevant historical
scholarship). From the later nineteenth century on, though, she is able to
trace a much more densely populated social history of Kerala, and the his-
tory of Syrian Christians within it. Among all the books under review here,
Privileged Minorities stands out for its attempt to engage the breadth and
depth of English-language scholarship on Kerala’s history and its modern
politics, published almost entirely from within India.
The book explores four key domains of practice from the later nine-
teenth century on, as they impelled Syrian Christians to redefine and
reshape their community by regulating its practices and policing its
boundaries. Chapter 1 treats debates and contests around dress. As Tho-
mas points out, “communal clothing [was] worn specifically by women,
across groups—and it marked embodied gendered norms as well as com-
munal norms” (42). In such a sociohistorical context, she argues, “clothing
is embodied practice that is not always willed choice” (36). Syrian Christian
women wore the white chatta (a short tunic) and thuni (a cloth pleated
and draped around the body), an attire that declared their “similarity to
upper caste women’s clothing” (38). The choice of attire also marked the
adoption of “a specific sort of morality defined by upper-caste privilege
and restrictions on women’s mobility” (43).
In the 1950s, though, she finds that Syrian Christian women suddenly
transitioned to the sari: a move that began in the cities and spread to the
countryside. She traces how the sari’s origins outside Kerala, and its
association with urban modernity within Kerala, were both interpreted by

women as “embodying Kerala’s shedding of its communal past” (54). She
also argues, however, that in adopting the sari Syrian Christian women
ended up adopting, consciously or not, many of the values of India’s
“majoritarian secularism” (55). She ends her discussion of the politics of

dress and identity with a brief discussion of young women across religious
communities in present-day Kerala switching to the churidar kameez, leg-
gings and a loose, long tunic, long associated with Muslim culture from
northern India. One wonders if, in a context saturated with the boundary-
marking functions of dress, young women are taking to a form of dress
that is so alien that it is resistant to marking membership of any group
within Kerala.
Chapter 2 explores “how race functions in South Asia, not necessarily as
a recognized or identifiable social category but through symbiotic assem-
blages between social identities that, when deconstructed, reveal the inner
workings of intersectional caste-, religious-, class-, color-, and caste-based
power dynamics” (67). Syrian Christian mytho-histories of their origins—
that they were originally Brahmans, converted to Christianity by Thomas
the Apostle in the first century of the Common Era—also “tend to highlight
phenotypical differences” to emphasize superior social rank (81). Similarly,
darker skin color is closely associated with the degraded social rank
confirmed by hereditary occupations involving manual labor (84).
Chapter 3 moves to political protests in the late 1950s over the Syrian
Christian community’s right to maintain its own educational institutions
without obeying state mandates on inclusiveness. The right of minority
religious communities to run their own educational institutions was guar-
anteed by the Indian Constitution as a way of protecting and transmitting
minority cultures to the next generations. An elected Communist govern-
ment in Kerala in the late fifties, though, argued that any public subsidies
accepted by such schools meant that the state had a right to regulate them,
within reason. Syrian Christians mobilized against the draft law as it was
tabled for debate in the state legislature. Syrian Christian women came
out to protest in defense of their community’s culture and its rights as a
minority. The draft law was defeated. Thomas presents a subtle analysis
of the contradictions here—Syrian Christian women protested in defense
of the community that restricted their mobility and burdened them with
the responsibility for upholding the community’s morality. In the context
of these protests, Thomas asks, provocatively, “what the calls for minority
rights actually set out to protect” (92).
She sees similar ironies and paradoxes in the opposition from Syrian
Christian women to the Dowry Prevention Bill. Dowry was seen as “part of
Christian personal law, which was itself an extension of so-called Christian
culture” (101). She points out how “the ‘culture’ of curtailing women’s
property rights, and of making economic dependence on husbands com-

pulsory for Syrian Christian women, was not discussed in the debates, nor
was the fact that a tenth of the stridhanam [dowry] went to the Church”
(104). In short, if the protests against educational reform cast the issue in
terms of the rights of minorities to preserve their culture, the elements of
this culture that were being defended were highlighted in the agitations
against the Dowry Prevention Bill. Thomas sees this history as impelling
scholars to interrogate “what sort of minority women we are talking about,
what benefits they reap from minority rights struggles, and at whose
expense.” She also argues that these “differing gendered codes of conduct
make feminist solidarity between castes and classes and among minority
populations virtually impossible” (114).
It is the quest for an instance of political mobilization across group
boundaries that takes Thomas to a discussion of battles about school text-
books in chapter 4. Syrian Christians led a coalition of religious groups and
organizations agitating for the removal of a discussion about an interfaith
marriage in a school textbook. “Christian [school] managements claimed
that the textbook interfered with their constitutional right to morally edu-
cate children” (125). In this context, Thomas reminds us of Anupama Rao’s
(2003: 3) caution that “feminism’s capacity to represent women as some-
how unmarked or disembodied from their caste or religious identity stands
to throw feminism (and its conceptions of gender identity) into crisis.”
Privileging Minorities argues, though, that “throwing feminism and its con-
ceptions of gender identity into crisis is a necessary good that can allow
South Asian feminisms to rethink feminist activism across group bound-
aries in postsecular times” (146). It is thematically appropriate, then, that
the book ends with a brief discussion of how Charismatic and Pentecos-
tal Christianity open a “domain of shared spirituality” between Syrian
Christian women across class boundaries, and between them and women
of other Christian denominations. Thomas ends by invoking Saba Mah-
mood’s call to rethink women’s piety and religiosity even if they lie beyond
feminism’s conventional understanding of politics.
Privileged Minorities narrates the history of Kerala’s Syrian Christian
community in the late colonial and postcolonial periods, and Thomas does
so with a keen eye for the paradoxical consequences of minority status and
minority culture for the community’s women. Because the book achieves
this as well as it does, this reviewer wonders about the gains of a more
overtly disciplinary historical method. It would have helped if the bibliog-
raphy distinguished between primary sources and secondary sources.

Moreover, one wonders how else this history could have been enriched by
recourse to other archives. To cite just one possible instance, do the various
sectarian divisions of the Syrian Christian community maintain parish
records or their equivalent for births, deaths, and marriages? What would
those records reveal about socioeconomic hierarchies within the commu-
nity? What kinds of evidence remain underexplored, in the Malayalam-
language print sphere, in a state with the largest per capita penetration
of newspapers and periodicals over several decades now? And, given that
the book also relies heavily on ethnographic interviews, would the per-
spectives of darker-skinned Syrian Christian women, or of less prosperous
members of the community have been different?
The two remaining books discussed in this review belong to an entirely
different disciplinary orientation, that of development studies, especially
gender and development. Afiya S. Zia’s Faith and Feminism in Pakistan: Reli-
gious Agency or Secular Autonomy? is a history of the women’s movement in
Pakistan, told through its tangled relationship with Islam and with the
Pakistani state. The strengths of this book are manifold. For one, it does
not resort to the easy maneuver of pitting Pakistani feminists against a
patriarchal doctrine articulated by male ulema. Instead, Zia chooses to out-
line the far more complicated history of “influence, impact and interplay”
between feminists and women’s faith-based politics. Zia begins by high-
lighting the debates and strategies within the leading urban women’s
group, the Women’s Action Forum (WAF), in the 1980s and 1990s, on
whether they should work within an Islamic framework or retain their
secular alignment. The WAF was founded in 1981 and came of age during
the military dictatorship of General Zia ul-Haq (1977–88), when the state
and sections of society put their energies into an Islamization campaign.
Zia presents with stark clarity the ramifications and consequences of such
a campaign. Islamization meant that the state gave religious groups and
political parties unprecedented access to state offices and to policy framing
and enforcement (28). She points to the emergence of organizations and
institutions like the Council on Islamic Ideology, with both de facto and de
jure authority (29). Most tellingly, she points to the “private and public
power and benefits accrued through Islamization for Muslim Pakistani

men” as a key factor in generating consent for state policy among key sec-
tions of society (28). By 1991 when the WAF consciously decided to take a
secular stance, it was in this historical context that they demanded diver-
sity and equality for women and minorities, demanding neutrality in state

offices and policies.
Meanwhile, state policy encouraged many women and women’s groups
to set up organizations and funded projects deploying “empowerment . . .
within cultural Islam,” such as the heavily funded “Women’s Empower-
ment in the Muslim Context” project (32). State policy was thus providing
explicit incentives and political and financial support for those who were
arguing that empowerment was possible in Islam, rather than as shaped by
and achieved through women’s struggles. At this conjuncture then, many
women’s organizations in Pakistan began to suggest that Muslim contexts
required a specialized approach to rights and to development. Interna-
tionally, these debates found echoes—both unintended and intentional—
with the debates on Western universalism versus culturally relevant
human rights that culminated in the United Nations (UN) International
Conference on Human Rights in 1993 (31).
In both her chronology and in the organization of her chapters, Zia
suggests that this is the political context—the shift toward those rights
and those development campaigns that the state deemed to be consistent
with Islam—in which we should comprehend the influential writings of
the late Saba Mahmood, who argued for Muslim women’s pietist agency.
In chapter 2—argued clearly enough that it can be used by itself in the
undergraduate and graduate classroom—Zia reminds us how, in the con-
text of the post-9/11 preoccupation with counterterrorism, transnational
and liberal feminisms were appropriated by conservative projects for racist
and imperialist ends. In response, a countercurrent, led in the instance
of Pakistan by mostly diasporic women, has sought to sever secular femi-
nism from the Muslim context (38). Thus Mahmood proposes “a detach-
ment of (Muslim women’s) agency from the goals of liberal and feminist
politics.” In the literary and anthropological scholarship inspired by Mah-
mood, then, “concepts such as embodied agency, desires, and ethics of
Muslim women have been explored, yet the actual political consequences
of piety have remained under-examined or deliberately sidelined” (39).
Ultimately, Zia argues, Mahmood seeks to “uncouple the notion of self-
realization from that of the autonomous will, as well as agency from the
progressive goal of emancipatory politics.” And for her, this decoupling

of agency from emancipatory ends might as well be called the redirecting
of agency toward patriarchal and conservative ends (41).
Beyond the intellectual critique of Mahmood and the scholars she has
inspired, though, Zia points out, with acuity, the bind that such postsecu-

larist scholarship places on “pragmatic political activism in Muslim con-
texts” (45), wherein faith-based politics becomes the only relevant, even
valid, lens. For Zia and for secular feminists in Pakistan, there is great
clarity on the issue that national laws should comply with universal human
rights, and that the latter is the rubric for women’s rights as well. Women’s
rights activists have thus advocated for the modernist project of legal
reform and have defended the relatively secular 1973 Constitution of Paki-
stan against attempts to Islamicize it (49). In place of the postsecularist
lens, Zia chooses to focus on the interrelatedness of gender, work, and
religion. The term autonomy is recuperated by being defined narrowly but
sharply, in terms of “self-sufficiency, independence, physical mobility
and economic and personal decision-making” (60–61). It is in light of
these concerns that Zia focuses on the Pakistan government’s Lady Health
Workers’ Programme in chapter 3.
In place of piety, Zia focuses on work and working women. She explores
the uneven, even rocky, relationship between economic empowerment
and autonomy. If the focus is on the empowerment of women, then state
policy promoting gender segregation needs to be comprehended not
merely as ideologically or culturally Islamist. Instead, such state policy is
an impediment to women’s ability to work. Equally constrained are wom-
en’s “access to any public office, employment or services or for that matter,
independent choice in matters of marriage, sexuality and reproductive
decisions” (71). The consequence is that women struggle under “an invisi-
ble triple burden of purdah, household work and paid work” (70, quoting
Khan 2007). Zia finds the converse to be true as well. Even in remote areas,
when the state employs women in professions, prior social norms are
shown to be weakened. The Lady Health Workers’ program has promoted
widespread, reversible contraceptive use, in addition to demonstrating
the benefits of the woman’s additional wage for her family, as well as the
benefits of the eight years’ schooling needed for employment as a Lady
Health Worker in the first place.
Zia shows how the secular methods of the Lady Health Workers have
been “effective” and “successful” at delivering “basic services to all
members of a community, regardless of religious affiliation.” She also

points out how such social welfare work gave them “status and a pragmatic
and purposeful social calling” independent of piety. And Zia shows how it
was precisely this secular calling that prompted the Taliban to carry out a
series of targeted killings of Lady Health Workers in 2012. As the door-to-

door visits of Lady Health Workers decreased sharply, the rate of polio
vaccinations also fell sharply. Zia documents how in 2013 UNICEF pub-
lished a booklet of multiple fatwas, religious decrees, endorsing vaccina-
tion. In a context in which “states keep abdicating more and more public
services and spaces to clerical intervention,” and “international agencies
continue with this religio-cultural methodology of delivering basic ser-
vices,” Zia notes, “the likelihood of framing a rights-based discourse in
anything other than a faith-based proposal” is going to be remote (82–83).
Chapter 4 explores the construction of the “agentive Islamist woman”
in popular culture and within the discourses and practices of religious
nationalisms and Islamic extremism in Pakistan. While scholars have
argued for the agency and modernizing agenda of Islamist women in
political parties like Jamaat-e Islami, Zia points out that the activism of
these Islamist women “contradicts and restricts other women’s empower-
ment if it does not conform with the religiously prescribed mould” (100).
Chapter 5 considers the commodifying of Muslim femininity. Zia invokes
Anthony Appiah to argue compellingly that “the market forces of capital-
ism consumerism necessarily compete against any limiting, purist notions
of inner, spiritual, non-material desires. Instead, the market seeks to tap
into and reify, re-inscribe and reinforce . . . Muslim women’s outward
identities, external lifestyles and public belonging, in relation to their
beliefs” (106). Key to this trend is what Zia describes as “donor-driven
Islam”—that is, “donor initiatives to re-embed a gendered identity through
the lens of Islam” (115). Another critical factor, according to Zia, is the
ambivalence of liberals, who “often subscribe to ‘lifestyle liberalism’ rather
than remaining steadfastly committed to a political liberalism and so,
increasingly lose ground to religious conservatism in the public sphere”
(125–26). The increasing Islamicization of the Pakistani state and society
are then an articulation of this conjuncture.
Chapter 6 deals with the compromises and setbacks within liberal or
secular women’s groups in their “resistance strategies” (128). Zia chal-
lenges the perspective of those scholars who argue that Pakistani feminists
“invite imperialism by critiquing misogyny in Muslim contexts.” She
argues for a renewed scholarly focus on the “complexities involved in

activist work and the mundane issues feminists have to deal with, broker
over and negotiation with—whether these are with state enforcement
agencies, political male resistance and/or customary practices” (152–53).
Chapter 7 documents how liberal feminist politics in Pakistan has been

able to offer nonfeminist women “a channel of struggle and expectations
of equal rights through activism that is not limited, facilitated or filtered
through religious discourse.” In this final chapter, Zia powerfully docu-
ments how political activism in Muslim contexts often does not rely on
religion or religious identities. On the contrary, “religious actors and
patriarchal considerations directly impede” the secular resistance of
working women (155). Zia invokes Rubina Saigol’s work on the women’s
corp of the Okara Peasant Movement (of 1999) in Punjab. One of her other
case studies in this chapter pertains to the consequences of the 2001 Local
Government Ordinance, under which 33 percent of seats in all three tiers
of local government were reserved for women. An additional 17 percent
representation was reserved in the provincial and national assemblies.
Some thirty-six thousand women entered local government in the elections
held in 2002. They may have been untrained and unprepared for their
roles, but they formed the cross-party Women Councillors’ Network
(WCN)—the only “nationwide, membership-based and democratically
elected network in the country that has effectively aggregated and articu-
lated women’s interest in the local government” (168). She also documents
how, just as Lady Health Workers and teachers in public schools for girls
have been threatened and attacked, women entering local government
were also targeted.
Zia points out the double hazard for such mobilizations and movements
of women’s secular resistance: on the one hand, conservative forces on
the ground—well organized and well funded Islamist groups with the
selective backing of provincial and federal governments—beat back any
gains won on secular grounds through violence, both threatened and real.
To compound matters, an anthropologically inflected scholarship often
neglects to even document such secular gains. In Zia’s own eloquent sum-
mation of the dilemma faced by secular feminists in Pakistan: “The politi-
cal reality is that conservatism, whether in the form of religion or politics
will challenge and can easily displace tolerant, liberal and moderate values
unless the state enforces its own liberal identity categorically and if civil
society organizes its secular resistance with less ambiguity” (171).
Faith and Feminism in Pakistan is rough around the edges—the footnotes

could have been more extensive, for one. It is invaluable, however, in being
a first draft of the history of secular feminism and feminists in Pakistan.
As such, it highlights, through contrast, the emphasis on Islam as a key
vector in so many scholarly studies of women and gender in Pakistan that

originate in North America. Zia provides trenchant critiques of much of
this scholarship and outlines for her peers and students alike the political
stakes involved in how we think about the relationship between women,
religion, and the state. The last book under review in this essay focuses
on the relationship between women and the state, as articulated in state
policy, and on how women in general, and feminist academics and activists
in particular, engage with that policy and with the state.
Maitreyee Mukhopadhyay’s edited volume, Feminist Subversion and Com-
plicity: Governmentalities and Gender Knowledge in South Asia, contains nine
essays and is the outcome of three conferences in Amsterdam, Johannes-
burg, and Kathmandu. The book is divided into two sections: “From the
Ideal of Equality to the Administrative Reality of Governmentalities” and
“Between Politics and Governmentalities: The Changing Role of Women’s
Movements.” Unlike the other books under review in this essay, with the
exception of Zia, this is the only volume with contributions from academics
and activists all living in South Asia, in the countries that they work in
and write about. As the editor Mukhopadhyay states in her introduction,
the book has a very specific agenda: to evolve a critique of that form of
feminist practice that has sought to insert “gender knowledge into govern-
mental and inter-governmental development policies.” The volume is thus
intended as a critical interpretation of “various initiatives by the authors
themselves . . . to integrate gender perspectives in national and interna-
tional development and to further women’s rights” (1). Mukhopadhyay
argues that in considering the reality of “governance feminism”—“the
incremental but by now quite noticeable installation of feminists and fem-
inist ideas in actual legal-institutional power”—we need to move beyond
evaluating the success or failure of feminists and feminist politics. Instead,
we need to explore “what are the dominant set of practices and technolo-
gies of power that have structured and shaped the process and framed
feminist practice” (2).
Michel Foucault’s conception of governmentality provides the key
theoretical tool here, to thinking not merely of governing or “what state
authorities do” but of “the conduct of conduct.” A focus on governmentality—
rather than government or governance per se—enables an exploration of

“the regimes of practices that are deployed to represent and to get to know a
problem, interlinked with acting upon it to transform it” (3–4). The other
key argument in the book has to do with the urgent imperative of pro-
ducing “situated knowledge,” of governance feminism from within the

nation-states of South Asia—Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka,
and India. Impelling this return to the “spatial, temporal and historical
locations and belonging” is a recognition of the vicissitudes of the present
moment. While the UN conferences of the 1990s offered social move-
ments, nongovernmental organizations, and other groups new oppor-
tunities to participate in global fora,
they also inaugurated those modes of governance . . . in which transfor-

matory ideas about citizen participation, the environment, sexual and
reproductive rights and, most importantly . . . the politics of emancipa-
tion, were increasingly governmentalized. And with this, some of the
most rebellious social movements such as feminist movements demand-
ing equality and justice were disciplined into liberal projects. . . . Femi-
nist knowledge in governance institutions became a form of “expertise”
and feminists themselves led divided lives, constantly strategically
framing their feminism when peddling their special expertise. (19)
Meanwhile, two decades and more of transnational feminist advocacy

in global institutions and fora has meant the flattening out and homoge-
nizing of the vastly different experiences of women around the world.
Indeed, Mukhopadhyay argues that such incorporation of feminist ideas
into global development policy “is reversing the basic tenets of transna-
tional feminist movements, which sought to decompose the production
of the unified Third World woman” (5). Global and globalized develop-
ment policy also ignore local struggles for women’s rights on the one hand,
and “the structural and re-distributional issues that lead to the denial
of rights” on the other (6).
Instead, this book seeks to understand how “local projects of govern-
ment interpellate global governance discourses and produce the gendered
subject, and with what consequences” (7). Dipta Bhog’s essay explores the
category of “girl child” in the context of elementary education in India.
Bhog discusses the nature of the policy analysis about the causes of the girl
child’s exclusion from education and “the procedures adopted to bring
her into elementary education” (59). The essay has one of the strengths
of all the chapters in this book: it provides a useful outline of the relevant
policy—in this case, education policy—in the postcolonial nation-state
in question. Bhog argues that “there is a governmentalization of gender in
school education, where both the practice of gender and the nature of
knowledge produced on gender are deeply tied to the state’s mandate

to govern” (60). The consequences of multiple policy initiatives have been
decidedly mixed. On the one hand, gender is located in the social domain,
so that attitudes—in the community, among teachers, and among
learners—have to be addressed. This means that official policy fails to
recognize structural inequities, let alone address them. Second, gender is
split from feminism and evaluated exclusively in terms of developmental
goals such as lowered fertility and delayed marriage. Any understanding
of “the structures and institutions that create inequity between men and
women” is thus discarded (85).
Jasodhara Dasgupta reflects on a decade’s work on maternal health
in Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state. From an initial concern with
improving women’s health, her organization expanded to focus on repro-
ductive health and reproductive rights. She documents how discrimination
and social exclusion of poor, vulnerable women in society (including
Dalit and Muslim women) carry over into the health and justice systems,
whereby such women are denied treatment in local hospitals (103). Sus-
tained grassroots work has prompted Dasgupta to advocate for “collective
rights claiming” in place of human rights’ definitions of individuals as
rights holders (116). This is especially because, in theory, “putative citi-
zens . . . can engage with state actors . . . while remaining within the
democratic state-citizen contract.” Poor and otherwise marginalized
women, who are the targets of the government’s development interven-
tions, are excluded from membership within “civil society” as well, and
they have to resort to other strategies (119). Chulani Kodikara shows how
women’s citizenship in contemporary Sri Lanka is constructed differently
than men’s. While a Local Authorities Elections (Amendment) Act was
passed in 2012, under sustained pressure from women’s groups, it was
diluted by leaving the nomination of women as candidates in local elec-
tions up to the discretion of political parties (137). While a Prevention of
Domestic Violence Act had been passed in 2005, it has since been attacked
for vitiating relationships between husbands and wives and has falsely
been held responsible for an increase in the incidence of divorce (144).
Sohela Nazneen reflects on the production of knowledge about gender
in the global South, in which such research is often produced in collabora-

tion with researchers in the global North and funded by international
agencies. “The governmentalities created by global research consortia”
depend on the sorting and categorization of “useful knowledge” on gender
and development (158–59). Qualitative methods are widely held to be less

effective, and even less empirically rigorous, than data generated through
large quantitative surveys and randomized control trials, in shaping donor
policy as well as governmental policy in the global South (172). Nazneen
eloquently describes how such “moments of disjuncture between the
feminist political self and the technical expert created a schizophrenic self
and emotional dissonance, which was at times . . . exhausting” (179).
J. Devika provides a revealing history of feminists and the women’s
movement in Kerala, long hailed in the literature as a developmental suc-
cess story. She documents the rise of political feminism since the 1990s,
in opposition to Kerala’s largest and most powerful communist party, the
Communist Party of India (Marxist) or CPM. Political feminists tended to
be radical left in their political orientation and sought to organize a com-
prehensive assault on patriarchy in the domains of state, civil society,
and market (186)—through organized protests against police violence,
critiques of patriarchy in print, and the organizing of impoverished women
workers in traditional occupations. Meanwhile, “developmentalist femi-
nism” was constituted by “educated, largely middle-class, middle-caste
women of powerful communities”—moving from the dominant left
parties’ trade unions and mass organizations to the people’s science
movement with its aspiration for a new, development-oriented pedagogy
and public activism (188). While the latter group has been supported by
the state, predictably, they have also been used by the state to blunt some
of the radical critiques mounted by political feminism. Rita Thapa reflects
on the possibilities and limits of women’s activism in the “Aidland” that
is Nepal since the 1950s. International aid has poured into the country and
has reshaped social relations as well as state policy to be consonant with
the developmentalist goals of international agencies. As documented
elsewhere in this book, Thapa’s chapter also documents the constraints
imposed by such agencies: during the period of intense civil war in the early
twenty-first century, aid agencies withdrew from the countryside precisely
when local communities needed the most support, when infrastructure
was being destroyed in the conflict. Thapa also provides an invaluable,
first-person account of her setting up the Nepal women’s fund, Tewa,
without international aid.
Firdous Azim recounts protests by the women’s group Naripokkho (est.

1983) in Bangladesh against the military regime’s constitutional amend-
ment of 1988 (the Eighth Amendment) that declared Islam to be the state
religion in a country that had hitherto been secular. Azim reconstructs the
headiness of the protests against the Eighth Amendment, and the political

conjuncture at which a fledgling women’s group was able to spearhead a
broad, secular coalition against the amendment. The essay goes on to
reflect on the gains and losses after this early history. On the one hand,
secular feminists have drawn the ire of both Islamist groups and tradition-
alist clergy, as well as the ire of the state. On the other hand, Islamic groups
have incorporated a discourse of women’s rights (because they have had
to?) and claimed to reinterpret them within an Islamist framework. Islamic
reading groups (taleem groups) led by charismatic women in neighbor-
hoods end up creating limited gains for at least some women. Kausar Khan
documents the history of the Women’s Action Forum, the oldest secular
feminist group in Pakistan, as it engaged the Pakistani state at four key
historical moments: during Zia ul Haq’s military dictatorship marked by
aggressive Islamicization, during the years of Benazir Bhutto’s democrati-
cally elected government, during the years of General Pervez Musharraf ’s
more socially liberalizing dictatorship, and in the first five years after
Musharraf. Taking a long-view perspective, Khan sees this as a “roller
coaster ride for women’s rights” in Pakistan. This is ground that Zia covers
in much more detail in her book-length study of the Women’s Action
Forum in Pakistan.
These are books that speak to each other and offer critiques of each
other in subtle ways. Thomas’s disaggregation of the Syrian Christian
minority in Kerala along axes of class, caste, and gender suggests to us
what the gains of a comparable disaggregation might be for Shandilya,
Reddy, and Aguiar. Zia and Mukhopadhyay alert us to the real dangers
of taking discourse at face value—whether it comes from the state, from
social groups, or from individual women. Zia’s work poses methodological
questions for Thomas about the perils of taking the Syrian Christian com-
munity at its own word—without reference to mobilizations in any other
community or mobilizations beyond religious community—within the
contested politics of contemporary Kerala. Between them, the books
reveal the breadth of the archive for comprehending the place of women
in the past and the present. They also remind us about the need for caution
in thinking about archives as feminists, and as South Asian feminists
especially, confronted by archives with their own erasures and amnesia

(Arondekar 2009; I. Chatterjee 2012).
It is the sheer diversity of these books, however, that raises questions
about intellectual coherence and curriculum building in the field of
women’s studies. Interdisciplinary programs encourage a diversity of

perspectives that can be enriching for scholars and students alike. Inter-
disciplinary programs also struggle, though, over fundamental questions
of disciplinary method and rigor, as apparent in some of the questions
raised in this review essay. Those struggles carry over into academic
publishing as well, as women’s studies scholarship and peer review are
concerned primarily (if understandably) with the institutional contexts
of this interdisciplinary field. What may well be lost in this process is the
capacity to comprehend and to engage with the density, even the radically
alien nature, of social worlds beyond North America and Western Europe,
whether in the past or in the present.
.........................................................................................
Ramya Sreenivasan is associate professor of South Asian history at the University

of Pennsylvania. As a social historian of transitions to the early modern era and to
the colonial era, she studies soldiering groups in northern India between the four-
teenth and nineteenth centuries, and works on histories of kinship and households.
Notes
1 See especially Francesca Orsini’s (2002) introduction, “Srngara, ‘Ishq, Love.”
2 For reform in colonial Bengal, especially in the context of writing and print,
see Bhattacharya 2005; for reform and its politics in colonial Punjab where
Nazir Ahmed lived and wrote, see Jones 1976 and Malhotra 2002.
3 For an exploration of these questions in the context of recent Bollywood
cinema, see Wilkinson-Weber 2010.
4 For a feminist ethnographic perspective on family courts in contemporary
India, see Basu 2015; for contestations around conjugality in contemporary
India, see Basu and Ramberg 2015.
Works Cited
Arondekar, Anjali. 2009. For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Aslam, Nadeem. 2004. Maps for Lost Lovers. New York: Vintage Books.
Basu, Srimati. 2015. The Trouble with Marriage: Feminists Confront Law and Violence in India.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Basu, Srimati, and Lucinda Ramberg, eds. 2015. Conjugality Unbound: Sexual Economies,
State Regulation, and the Marital Form in India. New Delhi: Women Unlimited.
Bhattacharya, Tithi. 2005. The Sentinels of Culture: Class, Education, and the Colonial
Intellectual in Bengal (1848–85). New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Blackburn, Stuart, and Vasudha Dalmia, eds. 2004. India’s Literary History: Essays
on the Nineteenth Century. Ranikhet: Permanent Black.
Chatterjee, Indrani. 2012. “When ‘Sexuality’ Floated Free of Histories in South Asia.”

Journal of Asian Studies 71, no. 4: 945–62.
Chatterjee, Partha, ed. 1995. Texts of Power: Emerging Disciplines in Colonial Bengal.
Calcutta: University of Minnesota Press and the Centre for Studies in Social
Sciences, Calcutta.
Cott, Nancy. 2000. Public Vows. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Jones, Kenneth. 1976. Arya Dharm: Hindu Consciousness in Nineteenth-Century Punjab.
Khan, Ayesha. 2007. “Women and Paid Work in Pakistan: Pathways of Women’s
Empowerment South Asia Research Programme.” Karachi: The Collective for
Social Science Research.
Malhotra, Anshu. 2002. Gender, Caste, and Religious Identities: Restructuring Class
in Colonial Punjab. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Mir, Farina. 2010. The Social Space of Language: Vernacular Culture in British Colonial Punjab.
Orsini, Francesca. 2002. “Introduction: Śṛṅgāra, ’Ishq, Love: The Many Meanings
of Love in South Asia.” Modern Asian Studies 36, no. 1: 99–102.
Orsini, Francesca, ed. 2007. Love in South Asia: A Cultural History. New Delhi:
Cambridge University Press.
Rao, Anupama, ed. 2003. Gender and Caste. New Delhi: Kali for Women.
Wilkinson-Weber, Clare M. 2010. “A Need for Redress: Costume in Some Recent
Hindi Film Remakes.” BioScope 1, no. 2: 125–45.

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S TAT E OF THE F IELD

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These six books—ﬁve monographs and one edited volume—represent

meridians  feminism, race, transnationalism 20:1 April 2021

the present sociopolitical moment, whether in North America or in the

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of “sexual-spiritual desires . . . expressed through . . . wifely devotion,

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the expense of depth of understanding: of social histories, literary ﬁelds,

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American Culture traces “how transnational itineraries of Indian beauty and

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“assemblage,” invoking Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Understanding

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reinvention of arranged marriage “as an emblematic practice” within

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strategy to interpret legal debates, media reports, mass market memoirs,

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the self-fashioning of various diasporic communities that are pertinent for

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association with urban modernity within Kerala, were both interpreted by

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power and beneﬁts accrued through Islamization for Muslim Pakistani

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progressive goal of emancipatory politics.” And for her, this decoupling

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members of a community, regardless of religious aﬃliation.” She also

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argues for a renewed scholarly focus on the “complexities involved in

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Faith and Feminism in Pakistan is rough around the edges—the footnotes

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rather than government or governance per se—enables an exploration of

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they also inaugurated those modes of governance . . . in which transfor-

Meanwhile, two decades and more of transnational feminist advocacy

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in the global South, in which such research is often produced in collabora-

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Firdous Azim recounts protests by the women’s group Naripokkho (est.

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especially, confronted by archives with their own erasures and amnesia

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Ramya Sreenivasan is associate professor of South Asian history at the University

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meridians feminism, race, transnationalism 20:1 April 2021